The following list was decided after consultation between California Review of Books co-editors David Starkey and Brian Tanguay and the journal’s most frequent reviewers, Walter Cummins and George Yatchisin. As…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption by Peter E. Murphy
Toplight Review by Walter Cummins Peter Murphy relates the story of his adolescent and youthful perpetual drunkenness in the second person, addressing the person whose life he explores as “you”…
Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer
Rosetta Review by Walter Cummins Most of us tend to consider the Middle Ages and those who inhabited those distant centuries victims of an inferior world that we’re fortunate to…
A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space by Peter Selgin
Regal House Review by Walter Cummins Peter Selgin’s Boy’s Guide is in many ways a deceptive novel. From its playful title and lively accounts of the adolescent hi-jinks of the…
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Martin Aitken
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Stories of alternative realities are especially popular today. When I was teaching in an MFA program, more and more young students were abandoning literary realism…
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Sally Rooney’s central charterers in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, talk quite a bit, just about every time they interact, hashing and rehashing…
The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness by Leslie Valiant
Princeton Review by Walter Cummins As I read the explanatory chapters of Leslie Valiant’s The Importance of Being Educable—winner of the Turing Award, I found myself quibbling with him about…
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins Kate Atkinson’s title for her sixth Jackson Brodie detective novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook, offers a broad hint that she is about…
Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes
Johns Hopkins Review by Walter Cummins Kathryn Hughes appears to have taken great pleasure in writing Catland, bouncing back and forth between considering the life of Louis Wain, an artist…
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age To AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Random House Review by Walter Cummins It turns out that Yuval Noah Harari, in Nexus, his latest book, isn’t a complete fatalist. But one has to read to the end…