Knopf Review by Brian Tanguay Abraham Lincoln believed that democracy was the single greatest achievement in human history. How Lincoln came to this belief is less well known than other…
Tag: California Review of Books
An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski, Translated by Michael Lipton
New York Review of Books Review by Brian Tanguay In November 1944 Walter Kempowski was called up for mandatory service by the German government, and detailed to go from house…
Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by George Yatchisin Will Hermes admits he’s on a fool’s errand with the opening quote of the preface to his 529 page biography of Lou…
Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman | Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet by Dana Greene
Knopf | Illinois Review by David Starkey Some striking similarities emerge between the subjects of Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt and Dana Greene’s…
The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors by Jackie Bennett, with photographs by Richard Hanson
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having…
Fascism in America: Past and Present, Edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward
Cambridge University Press Review by Brian Tanguay One of the animating questions in the essays that comprise Fascism in America is whether or not our national political arrangement has reached…
The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly
Pegasus Review by Walter Cummins Not only could the title of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, be appropriate for Helena Kelly’s exposé of the many biographical deceptions she has…
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
Pantheon Review by David Starkey Helen Garner is having a well-deserved moment. The eighty-one-year-old author, renowned in her native Australia, but until recently barely known in the U.S., has benefited…
Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life by Janice Mason Steeves
Friesen Review by Linda Lappin Painter and art educator Janice Mason Steeves came to art quite by chance late in life after a friend invited her to attend a pottery…
Creature by Marsha de la O
Pittsburgh Review by George Yatchisin Ventura, California-based poet Marsha de la O knows of fire, force of destruction and engine of rebirth. Consider the poem “The Afterlife of Flames,” from…