Random House Review by Walter Cummins I read Tremor as the story of all that is taking place in the activities and in the mind of Tunde, Teju Cole’s protagonist,…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
The Boy with the Star Tattoo by Talia Carner
William Morrow Review by Walter Cummins Talia Carner personifies the turmoil of mid twentieth-century history in The Boy with the Star Tattoo by interweaving three narratives featuring individuals who struggle…
Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick
Bloomsbury Review by Walter Cummins I decided to read Becoming Beauvoir when I came across this endorsement in a review excerpt: “Here we finally have a biography that makes Beauvoir’s…
Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia by Tobias Becker and The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym
Basic Books | Harvard Review by Walter Cummins Tobias Becker opens his new book with this epigraph from the Beatles’ song to explain the origin of his title: “Yesterday /…
Signatures in Stone: A Bomarzo Mystery
Pleasure Boat Review by Walter Cummins Linda Lappin’s novel, which was the overall winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense in 2014, is now out in…
The Vulnerables: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez
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…
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…