Anansi Review by Brian Tanguay Leila, a fifty-something woman from Montreal, is part of a delegation visiting Palestine, her first trip to her father’s homeland. Leila is unmarried, an academic…
Tag: California Review of Books
The Norton Lectures Centenary Editions
Harvard Review by David Starkey The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University are, if not the most famous, then certainly among the most famous lectures in American letters. Established…
The Keeper by Tana French
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Although Tana French has won awards for crime fiction and mystery/thrillers, including an Edgar, The Keeper is little like our expectation of a mystery novel.…
The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly
Norton Review by David Starkey Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes…
The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom
Chicago Review by David Starkey Is Albert Camus’s most famous novel, The Stranger, a bit too programmatic? Is The Plague, which I reviewed during COVID, a bit too long? Is…
Brawler by Lauren Groff
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins The title of this collection is appropriate for each of its nine stories. In some literal brawls take place, the combatants physically scarred. In others…
The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins The image of Alfred Tennyson I’ve carried for decades goes back to the childhood card game of Authors that depicts him with a stately continence…
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 by Ian Buruma
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins While I was reading Stay Alive, bombs—many more powerful than those of World War II, others delivered by drones—were falling on a number of cities—Kyiv,…
Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Honeysuckle is one of the strangest novels I’ve read in a long while, and by strange I mean in the sense of unsettling and rarely…
Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay A fundamental political question lies at the heart of Billionaire Backlash by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee: who makes the rules? Is it individual billionaires…