(Bloomsbury) Review by Brian Tanguay “False information need not be coherent to be effective, and the specters of vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are easy enough to conjure.” So…
Tag: California Review of Books
And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
(St. Martin’s) Review by Walter Cummins The “finally” in Henry Marsh’s title refers to the clear signal that death awaits him. After seventy years of avoiding admission of that inevitability,…
Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake
(Abrams) Review by George Yatchisin What Marseilles is to the Mediterranean, New Orleans is to the Caribbean, a savory meeting place where countries and cultures, priests and pirates, hopeful and…
Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw
(Penguin Press) Review by Brian Tanguay In Personality and Power, historian Ian Kershaw poses and answers fundamental questions of historical analysis about twelve individuals who significantly impacted — for good…
Paul Newman and the Authorial Fallacy
Essay by Walter Cummins I’d always thought of Paul Newman as a pretty cool guy—handsome, talented as an actor, entrepreneurial supporter of the same causes I am, married to a…
Concrete Poetry: A 21st-century Anthology edited by Nancy Perloff
(Reaktion) Review by David Starkey Compare an accomplished short poem of several hundred characters—say Seamus Heaney’s “Wedding Day”—with just about any concrete poem of the same length, and you’ll quickly…
The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks
(Knopf) Review by Brian Tanguay The year is 1971. The place is Florida, south of Orlando. 81-year-old Harley Mann sits on the porch of the house he has lived alone…
Haven by Emma Donoghue
(Little, Brown and Company) Review by David Starkey The opening of Haven (the title’s similarity to “heaven” is hardly accidental) has the feel of a classic adventure story. A well-traveled,…
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Review by Walter Cummins Like Rachel Aviv, the people whose mental issues she explores in Strangers to Ourselves are driven to write, some with works that…
You’ll Like It Here by Ashton Politanoff
(Dalkey Archive) Review by George Yatchisin A fascinating smudging of the notions of the novel, Ashton Politanoff’s You’ll Like It Here alternates between being charming and creepy, nostalgic and prophetic,…