Review by Walter Cummins The character of Gwendolen Kelling provides a form of ballast to Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. It’s not that she can prevent the criminality and murders—bodies…
Tag: California Review of Books
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Review by David Starkey Patrick Radden Keeffe tells us in the Preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the twelve long-form…
Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
Review by David Starkey That Penguin Classics is publishing a new translation (by Allan Blunden) of a book packed with quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died in 1832,…
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller
The subtitle of Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph tells you most of what you need to know about the book’s contents. It is…
The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles
Review by Brian Tanguay I have never seen the Salton Sea with my own eyes. My experience of the Colorado Desert is limited to one or two road trips to…
Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen
Review by Elizabeth Starkey The introduction to Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain concludes with a recap of one of those piquant Tony voice-overs,…
Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun
Review by David Starkey As he appears in Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun’s father, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, seems like kind…
Foundlings by DeWitt Henry
Review by Jack Smith Essayist, memoirist, fiction writer, prize-winning novelist, and founder and editor of Ploughshares, DeWitt Henry has gained a solid reputation for his contributions to several literary forms,…
Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy by Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Review by Walter Cummins In her latest book, Shanda, Letty Cottin Pogrebin revisits the early and mid-twentieth century obsession with covering up family scandals that, if revealed, would destroy the…
Home: A Story of Emigration by Anthony Stevens
Review by Linda Lappin In this lyrical, hybrid narrative combining novel, documentary, autobiography, and diary, British author, Anthony Stevens pieces together a chapter of his family history: his great grandparents’…