Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns

Knopf Review by David Starkey I’ve refrained from watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary The American Buffalo to better assess its companion volume by Burns and Dayton Duncan, Blood…

The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser

Liveright Review by David Starkey Last month, I was lucky enough to be in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was my first visit to that august institution, so I…

The Talk by Darrin Bell

Henry Holt Review by David Starkey Darrin Bell’s The Talk joins James Spooner’s The High Desert as the second superb memoir published within a twelve month’s span about growing up…

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Knopf Review by David Starkey The cover of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is well-chosen. It shows the short, solid and tanned torso of Pablo Picasso beneath the three-dimensional…

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

Viking Review by David Starkey “It was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the aide to the great man, “how this guy could spread the bunk and make the…

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Knopf Review by David Starkey If, at the outset, Tessa Hadley’s characters in her new collection After the Funeral and Other Stories seem—despite their many muted traumas—to be doing more…

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

Viking Review by David Starkey Were it almost any author but Sebastian Barry, the slow unwinding of the first hundred and fifteen pages of this two-hundred-and-sixty-page novel might be enough…

All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley

Simon & Schuster Review by David Starkey What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored,…

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Random House Review by David Starkey Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel Romanic Comedy really is a romantic comedy, complete with lovers who initially seem mismatched, complications and hurdles, and an ending…

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

Knopf Review by David Starkey Early in Lorrie Moore’s new novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the protagonist, Finn, notes that while white schizophrenics are allowed…