Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn by James Donovan
  Posted on 25 Sep 2008 in History, Military, Native American, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Had Sitting Bull and his war chiefs reacted in the customary skirmishing style of Plains Indian warfare, the outcome would have been very different. But the Sioux and Cheyennes, fighting with their backs to the wall against the encroaching tide of white civilization, opted for a pitched battle and almost from the outset, Custer’s tactical plan went terribly wrong.

• Frida Kahlo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  Posted on 16 Jun 2008 in Art, Essays, Mexico
  

  Art critics may speculate about the influences on Kahlo’s style or her place in modern art. In the end, these reflections, however valid some of the details may be, diminish Kahlo’s achievement. The truth of Frida Kahlo’s life is startlingly simple. She recorded the realty of her life without flinching, creating for herself a world that conformed to her insights and her experience. And in the process, Frida Kahlo’s art became Frida Kahlo’s life.

• God’s Crucible by David Levering Lewis
  Posted on 23 Apr 2008 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion, Spain
  

  For English-speaking peoples, 1066 and 1776 still evoke powerful recollections of liberty lost and freedom won. For most people in the West, however, 711 hardly strikes a note of any significance. But it should, for that was the year when a small force of Muslim Arabs and Berbers from Morocco crossed over from North Africa to Spain. Islam reached Europe in 711 and the world has never been the same.

• The Life and Art of J.M.W. Turner
  Posted on 26 Feb 2008 in Art, Essays
  

  Nature in the form of searing sunlight and raging storms increasingly blotted out the works of man in the later paintings of Turner. This was an ironic juxtaposition of his painterly vision with the spirit of his times. For the progressive spirit of early Victorian Britain was propagating a world view whereby the industrial juggernaut of railroads, steam ships and factories would reshape the world to suit humankind’s fancy.

• Mirror of the World by Julian Bell
  Posted on 15 Jan 2008 in Art, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  It was partly in reaction to the religious discord and iconoclasm of the Reformation, that artists in Europe around 1700 began seeking inspiration from sources removed from Christian spirituality. And where European innovators led, artists of other traditions and cultures would in time follow. The journey on the road to “art for art’s sake” had begun.

• The Power of Art by Simon Schama
  Posted on 10 Jun 2007 in Art, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  For all of his own moral blemishes, Caravaggio knew exactly how to please the princes of the Catholic Church. He completely rejected the pretentious intellectualism and coy erotic themes that had preoccupied the Mannerist painters.

• Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy by Kent Nerburn
  Posted on 10 Apr 2007 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  No one knows for certain who first uttered the notorious statement that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” General Philip Sheridan, commander of the U.S. Army on the Western Frontier, often gets the dubious honor for a remark he reputedly made to a Comanche chief in 1869.

• Tim Flannery Discusses Global Warming
  Posted on 30 Mar 2007 in Environment, Interviews, Science
  

  “Getting nations to cooperate is important, but I think a quicker solution will come from what I call a carbon tax break. This involves taxing pollution at its source, whether it is generated by an oil company or a coal burning energy plant. The money raised by this carbon tax would be distributed to citizens who would then use it to purchase energy. Since gas or coal-produced energy which emit high levels of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would be highly taxed and thus more expensive, people would naturally buy the cheaper, and lower carbon emitting, forms of energy.”

• Art for a New Gilded Age
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Art, Essays
  

  Museums are designed – and public museums are mandated – to act as the stewards of the nation’s or a city’s heritage. The New York Public Library failed dismally in this respect, a failure only eclipsed by the National Gallery, which quite frankly is serving as the bagman for the theft of public art treasures from New York City and Philadelphia.

• Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde
  Posted on 16 Mar 2007 in Art, Biography, Essays
  

  The overall sensation evoked by examining the works on display in “Cezanne to Picasso,” however, is one of awe at his grasp and appreciation of the creative talent of artists spurned, at least initially, by the rest of the art world.