California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Book Review: Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War by Ted Morgan
  Posted on 15 Mar 2010 in France, History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews, Vietnam
  

  Giap had lost several family members to the rigors of French colonial rule, including his wife who was arrested and died in a French prison. A model of cool, methodical persistence, Giap was not goaded or tricked into a rash counterattack on Dien Bien Phu. He patiently assembled his forces, digging gun positions in the forested slopes overlooking the French defenses and amassing a huge supply of ammunition carried by thousands of porters through the jungle. Then on March 13, 1954, Giap struck at Dien Bien Phu, capturing several key strong-points and pounding the air strip so that supply planes could no longer land. The base aero-terrestre had become a death trap.

• Art Review: Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris at the Philadelphia Museum Of Art
  Posted on 25 Feb 2010 in Art, Art & Design
  

  If Salon Cubism pleased nobody in 1912, the recreation of the gallery from the Salon d’Automne in the Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris exhibition is bound to excite the highest praise. The paintings are clustered about the walls, many of them positioned well above the heads of viewers, which presents Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 from an especially striking position. Sculpture busts, including one by Amadeo Modigliani, are stationed in front of the paintings, revealing how displays of different types of art were often closely integrated during the pre-World War I era.

• The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson
  Posted on 16 Dec 2009 in History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  In some respects, the Thirty Years War resembles the Great War of 1914-1918. Political friction in Central Europe sparked a rush to arms that dragged in nations and peoples whose best interests lay in peace not war. With the focus of Europe’s economic activity shifting toward the Atlantic Ocean and the East Indian trade zones, the small states of Central Europe needed to integrate their economies to stay competitive. The last thing that petty states like Bohemia, Saxony, Bavaria and the Rhineland needed to do was throw away lives and treasure in futile warfare. But fight they did – for thirty years.

• Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 09 Nov 2009 in Art, Art & Design
  

  The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times, victims of Turkish aggression during the First World War. “Who now remembers the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler exclaimed, as he and his Nazi lieutenants planned the Final Solution. The answer can be found lining the walls of the masterful exhibition in Philadelphia. Arshile Gorky remembered. “I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush,” Gorky declared in 1944, “for all the world to see.”

• Empire of Liberty A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood
  Posted on 29 Oct 2009 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The “Era of Good Feeling” that followed 1815, however, was of short duration. The issue of slavery could not be banished, as the crisis that erupted in 1819 over admitting Missouri as a slave state showed. Even Jefferson, the “Sage of Monticello,” began to have doubts about the future, fearing that the “Empire of Liberty” that he and the other “Founding Fathers” had created might not survive “the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”

• The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
  Posted on 12 Oct 2009 in Architecture, Art, Art & Design
  

  And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased 181 works by Renoir, 69 by Cezanne, 7 Van Gogh paintings, 59 works by Matisse, 11 by Degas, 16 by Modigliani, 46 Picasso’s, with 4 apiece by Manet and Monet. He also collected modern American works by William Glackens, Charles Demuth and Maurice and Charles Prendergast. His eclectic tastes extended to African sculptures, European decorative art, American folk art and quirky curiosities like an American Civil War surgeon’s saw.

• Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein
  Posted on 29 Sep 2009 in History, Literary Themes, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  It was on the level of popular culture that the vital “center” of life in the United States held firm during the Great Depression. Weekly trips to the neighborhood movie house, looking at photos of a revitalized nation in Life Magazine, listening to President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats on the radio, following the home team in the still vigorous daily newspapers, these rituals of daily life were the principal means of keeping faith in America’s future, of believing that the only thing to fear was fear itself.

• The Stranger by Max Frei
  Posted on 16 Jul 2009 in Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  

  The Stranger is a translation of the first of a wildly popular series of novels from Russia. By turns serious and screwball, it combines sly, sometimes campy, humor with a yearning for personal insight and a good day’s sleep. The Stranger is an episodic quest set in a parallel universe, in which a Sherlock Holmes-Dr. Watson duo combat malign magicians and search for the perfect restaurant.

• How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy
  Posted on 15 Jun 2009 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Goldsworthy takes many of the reasons advanced by earlier scholars and shows them to be of far less significance than is often believed. In some cases, many of the old explanations are simply incorrect. Rome’s growing reliance upon “barbarian” troops, for instance, more often helped to safeguard its frontiers than to threaten them. Nor did rusty drain pipes, moral depravity or savage Hun raiders storming across the Eurasian steppes knock Rome off its pedestal.

• Cézanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 08 Apr 2009 in Art, Art & Design
  

  Matisse, in an essay written many years later for another Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, appraised the new approach to art that Cézanne had bequeathed to him and other leading spirits of Modernism. “There is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented,” Matisse wrote. “This is the only truth that matters …. Exactitude is not truth.”