Review by David Starkey Several years ago, as I was listening to the ambient music of Brian Eno, which has kept me company through decades of reading, writing and grading…
Category: Genres
Cuttings from the Tangle by Richard Buckner
Review by George Yatchisin Richard Buckner, songwriter, singer, can open a song with the lines “Tough is as she does, won’t you slump on over and stir my shuffle down,”…
The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax
Review by Brian Tanguay On the coast of California where I live drought has been a constant feature of the past twenty years. Enough rain some years made us forget,…
Phase Six by Jim Shepard
Review by David Starkey Right about now, probably the last thing most readers are looking for is another book about pandemics, and Jim Shepard’s new novel is a pandemic book…
We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller
Review by George Yatchisin In Charles Laughton’s fantastic 1955 fairy tale noir Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum’s curdled preacher is infamous for having “love” and “hate” tattooed across the…
How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness by Jessica Bell
CRB Brief Review by Peter Snell How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness is a tale of ordinary people and their struggles to have a happy and satisfying life. It is set…
Ladies Who Lunch: a satirical taste of L.A. by Josef Woodard
Review by George Yatchisin It’s 1990-something, and although fabulous Danielle Wiffard’s marriage is about to blow, fortunately for her (and this book’s readers), all of L.A.’s eligible bachelors, not to…
We Are Pilgrims: Journeys In Search of Ourselves by Victoria Preston
Review by Linda Lappin As Bruce Chatwin relates in Songlines, our remote ancestors revered features of their landscape: mountain, rock, river, tree, cave, imbuing them with spiritual meaning and celebrating them in…
Razor Wire Wilderness by Stephanie Dickinson
Review by Walter Cummins While the incarceration of Krystal Riordan dominates the pages of Razor Wire Wilderness—along with the ongoing miseries of her life since the day she was born—the…
Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future by James Shapiro
Review by David Starkey The introduction to James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future recounts the Public Theater’s 2017 staging…