Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins While reading The Vulnerables, my eye kept being drawn to the subtitle, A Novel, in the header at the top of every page, as if…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
California Review of Books – 10 Best Books of 2023
The following list was decided after much consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journals’ most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin.…
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins First, a confession. I was not an objective reader of Sapolsky’s book because I was looking for evidence to undermine his thesis and find some…
What I Know about July by Kat Hausler
Meerkat Review by Walter Cummins Throughout most of Kat Hausler’s novel very little is known about the young woman called July, especially by Simon Kesler, who is by far most…
Charming Young Man by Eliot Schrefer
HarperCollins Review by Walter Cummins Eliot Schrefer’s title character, his charming young man, Léon Delafosse, is a teenaged parvenu, a poor country boy sought after by fin de siècle Parisian…
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Viking Review by Walter Cummins As a fan of mysteries, especially those with academic settings, I was drawn to the description of Rebecca Makkai’s latest title. It offered situations that…
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins Emmanuel Kant relished fine wines and gourmet meals. Werner Heisenberg thought profoundly as he strolled through a park in winter. Jorge Luis Borges was devastated…
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Zadie Smith published a piece in The New Yorker about her efforts to ignore “the long shadow” of Charles Dickens (“On Killing Charles Dickens”) when…
Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder, trans. by Paulette Møller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Although Sophie’s World was first published in Norwegian more than thirty years ago and since then has been translated into close to…
The Purchased Bride by Peter Constantine
Deep Vellum Review by Walter Cummins Most novels develop around one or more central unknowns, not necessarily mysteries, but stated or unstated questions that impel the plot. Will some Ramsays…