Knopf Review by David Starkey Like a lot of readers in these unnerving times, I’m a sucker for a dystopian novel. Imagining how things might go wrong is oddly comforting:…
Tag: Review by David Starkey
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut
Columbia Review by David Starkey If you’ve ever had a friend who is brilliant, super-sarcastic, notices everything, can be incredibly mean but always is so in the service of some…
Small in Real Life by Kelly Sather
Pittsburgh Review by David Starkey When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of…
Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda
Liveright Review by David Starkey “Reading about how a succession of relatively small misjudgments and poor decisions can lead, with surprising speed, to human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale should,…
Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World by Edward Humes
Penguin Review by David Starkey In 2013’s Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, Edward Humes describes in detail the massive harm caused by America’s profligate production of trash. Garbology…
Byron’s Travels by Lord Byron, edited by Fiona Stafford
Everyman’s Library Review by David Starkey First of all, God bless Everyman’s Library. What other publisher lists among its new releases the novels and tales of Pushkin, the poetry of…
James by Percival Everett
Doubleday Review by David Starkey If you were going to choose an author to rewrite The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim/James, it would be…
California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline by Rosanna Xia
Heyday Review by David Starkey In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, Rosanna Xia, an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes: “When talking about climate…
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Riverhead Review by David Starkey In some respects, Lauren Groff’s latest novel is an old-fashioned adventure tale. It begins with a teen girl, “bony and childish small” but quick, smart…
The Lichen Museum by A. Laurie Palmer
Minnesota Review by David Starkey Readers thinking that lichen don’t sound like the most scintillating topic for a book have a valid concern. After all, these organisms created by the…