Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

Review by George Yatchisin Forget about the butterfly effect, it seems the last 130 years of U.S. foreign involvement should be called the Butler Effect. By that I refer to…

Hidden Cargoes by Chris Arthur

Review by Walter Cummins Hidden Cargoes—like Chris Arthur’s previous eight essay collections—is a book that can change your life, not so much your behaviors and beliefs but how you relate…

The Golden Fortress: California’s Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees by Bill Lascher

Review by Brian Tanguay It’s tempting to think of history as a succession of recurring events and to look to the past to foretell what might happen in the future.…

Code of Silence: Sexual Misconduct by Federal Judges, the System that Protects Them, and the Women Who Blew the Whistle by Lise Olsen

Review by Walter Cummins The lengthy subtitle to Lise Olsen’s exposé explains what the book is all about but doesn’t reveal the outcome of the long process that followed the…

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Review by Brian Tanguay When Daiyu, the protagonist of Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, is abducted from the fish market, she’s a desperately hungry thirteen-year-old…

A Conversation between David Starkey and Brian Tanguay

The following is a conversation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay. David Starkey: It’s been a couple of years now since we started the California…

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Review by David Starkey Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These was released just before Christmas of last year. Set in a small Irish town during Christmas 1985, the book…

The Magician by Colm Tóbín

Review by David Starkey We are clearly meant to sympathize with Thomas Mann, the title character of Colm Tóbín’s novel The Magician. A gay youth trapped in an uptight heterosexual…

The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right by David Roediger

Review by Brian Tanguay Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in America, made a statement in 2006 about class warfare which is often cited on the infrequent occasions when…

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl

Review by David Starkey In Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, Jed Perl takes on “the stranglehold of relevance…the extent to which [works of art] line up with…