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…
Tag: Review by David Starkey
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…
Blue Skies by T. C. Boyle
(Liveright) Review by David Starkey Even the grimmest climate change novels usually contain a glimmer of humor, and books like Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible contain passages that are downright…
The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century by Owen Hopkins
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey In The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century, Owen Hopkins, Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, focuses on three key…
Wildflowers of North America by the National Audubon Society
Knopf Review by David Starkey It’s spring here in Coastal California, and the atmospheric rivers that deluged our state have resulted in an abundance of wildflowers, which makes the publication…
The Intimate City: Walking New York by Michael Kimmelman
(Penguin) Review by David Starkey At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, it was not uncommon for people to pause and imagine a project they might carry out that would…
Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
(Riverhead) Review by David Starkey The cover of Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius features a Victorian top hat hanging on the tip of the penis-like…
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…