Blacks didn’t just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, they seized freedom and built homesteads, farms, churches, schools and communities; they tilled the soil and planted cash crops like…
Category: Genres
Poetry Book Reviews for the Holidays
by David Starkey Since 2014, first for the Santa Barbara Independent and then for the California Review of Books, every National Poetry Month, I’ve offered one very short review of…
Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrota
Review by David Starkey I must admit that I’ve never read Election, the novel by Tom Perrota on which the 1999 film—directed by Alexander Payne and starring Reese Witherspoon and…
All Possible Histories, by Sonia Greenfield
Review by Catherine Abbey Hodges One morning when my daughter was twelve, I became aware of her studying me. After a few moments, she said, “I wonder what it’s like…
Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit
Review by George Yatchisin Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses as a whydunit. Beyond admitting how much he influenced her as a writer/journalist/activist, Solnit was also moved to learn of…
Diary of a Void, by Emi Yagi
Review by David Starkey Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, winner of the Dazai Osamu Prize for a debut novel, is based on a simple yet irresistible premise. Shibata, the…
Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya
Review by Walter Cummins For me, the essential advice Kieran Setiya offers in Life Is Hard is related to the distinction he makes between telic and atelic activities in the…
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild
Review by Brian Tanguay As much as Louis Dejoy was in the media spotlight in the months before the presidential election of 2020, one might assume that no person as…
Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami
Review by Walter Cummins Novelist as a Vocation—Haruki Murakami’s collection of ten essays on novel writing, first published in Japan in 2015 but not translated into English until 2022—suggests that…
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
Review by David Starkey “Recitatif” is Toni Morrison’s only short story, and as she is one of the greatest novelists of the past fifty years, it deserves the careful attention…