California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Art Review: Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 30 Mar 2011 in Art, Art & Design
  

  Chagall was a major exception to the ready embrace of western modes of art and thought by artists from Eastern Europe. However much he might borrow a stylistic element from Cubism or Orphism, Chagall maintained a spiritual element in his art that was in keeping with his Jewish and Russian heritage.

• Book Review: From Splendor to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847-1928 by Julie P. Gelardi
  Posted on 15 Mar 2011 in Biography, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Russia
  

  Following this betrayal, the Romanov dynasty was swept off the stage of history. Many of the family were arrested by the Bolsheviks and executed, some with a degree of cruelty and incompetence that beggars belief. Marie Feodorovna and Marie Pavlovna were evacuated to safety, but the lives of both women were blighted by the near extermination of the Romanov family.

• Art Review: Gauguin: Maker of Myth, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
  Posted on 02 Mar 2011 in Art, Art & Design
  

  “You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it’s reflected in everything I do,” he wrote in 1889 to Theo van Gogh, brother to Vincent. “It’s the basis of my personality; I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on primitivism…”

• Book Review: Justice For Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin
  Posted on 17 Feb 2011 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy
  

  Dworkin believes firmly in “cooperative” interpretation, reinforcing ethical precepts with insights from history, literature and philosophy that have stood the test of time. Among the great philosophers, he summons Plato, Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Frederick Nietzsche to lend their voices to the debate.

• Book Review: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
  Posted on 01 Feb 2011 in Fiction Reviews
  

  The passing of Swamplandia!, a crass, hokey “hicksville” where live chickens are suspended from wires to get the gators to leap for their supper, hardly merits more than a moment of regret. But Russell’s evocation of the disintegration of the Bigtree clan is profoundly moving. Arms linked together, Ava, Kiwi and Ossie embrace “in a panic of love.” The mutual devotion of the Bigtree children is as heartfelt a tribute to steadfast family bonds as the ordeal of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath or the Finch children in To Kill a Mockingbird.

• The Civil War Begins: An Exhibition at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia
  Posted on 26 Jan 2011 in Art & Design, History
  

  These are not merely newspapers, letters, transcripts of speeches and official reports from the 1850′s through the first major battles of the war in 1861. To a very significant degree, the words inscribed on these timeworn documents actually influenced the outbreak of the Civil War.

• Book Review: Destiny and Desire by Carlos Fuentes
  Posted on 13 Jan 2011 in Fiction Reviews, Mexico
  

  A decapitated head washes ashore near the Mexican resort city of Acapulco. A young man, Josué, whose head it once was, uses this grisly episode to recount how he came to lose it. A more dramatic curtain raiser for a novel can scarcely be imagined.

• Book Review: The Sherlockian by Graham Moore
  Posted on 06 Jan 2011 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery
  

  There is a telling scene in the novel, when Conan Doyle visits the theatre managed by Stoker and is snubbed by the celebrated actress Ellen Terry, who is wearing a black armband to mourn the death of Sherlock Holmes. “The world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle,” Stoker declares. “The world needs Sherlock Holmes.”

• Art Review: Alessi: Ethical and Radical at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 30 Nov 2010 in Art, Art & Design, Design, Italy
  

  The Tea and Coffee Piazza sets, produced in limited editions of ninety-nine, with three artist’s proofs, were a critical success. The project served to introduce Michael Graves to the Alessi “stable,” while traveling exhibits informed museum patrons on the ways that high art and industrial design could form working partnerships. Mendini’s original conception was vindicated.

• Book Review: Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
  Posted on 29 Nov 2010 in Dance, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Homans’ concluding remarks, cogent and powerfully expressed like the rest of Apollo’s Angels, are going to send some powerful shock waves through an arts community content to let ballet companies limp along on the receipts of last year’s Nutcracker performances.

• Book Review: How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
  Posted on 10 Nov 2010 in Biography, France, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy
  

  Born nearly five hundred years ago, Montaigne was one of the last great thinkers of the Renaissance. He can also stake a claim to be the first recognizable writer of modern times. Montaigne’s Essays are stocked with insights of such relevance, inspiration and humanity that they might well have been written yesterday – or tomorrow.

• Art Review: Michelangelo Pistoletto Exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 03 Nov 2010 in Art, Art & Design, Italy
  

  Pistoletto first gained prominence in the world of art in the early 1960′s with his Quadri Specchianti. These “mirror paintings” positioned life-sized and astonishingly lifelike images of people on highly polished sheets of stainless steel.

• Book Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  Posted on 18 Oct 2010 in Classics, Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction, Russia
  

  Pasternak ranges the individualism of Zhivago against the heartless society that is being erected by the Bolsheviks on the grave of Tsarist Russia. Where Zhivago questions his every deed from the standpoint of conscience, left-wing leaders like Lara’s husband, Pasha Antipov, who styles himself as Strelnikov or “Shooter,” kill without blinking or thinking.

• Book Review: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
  Posted on 08 Oct 2010 in Biography, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Nevertheless, it is a considerable shock to read indictments of Washington in the letters of Patriot leaders such John Adams, Dr. Benjamin Rush and even Thomas Jefferson. Though some of these remarks were valid criticisms of specific decisions on the part of Washington, the reality of his wartime situation stands in marked contrast to the adulation later heaped upon him. As Abraham Lincoln would experience during the Civil War, Washington was frequently distrusted and damned during his lifetime, often by political colleagues and fellow officers who should have known better.

• Art Review: Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936
  Posted on 04 Oct 2010 in Art, Art & Design, Germany, Italy
  

  Chaos and Classicism tells the story of good intentions that went terribly wrong. After the carnage of trench warfare, sensitive spirits in Europe craved artistic depictions of beautiful bodies, unscathed by shrapnel, and timeless, uncluttered architecture inspired by the Greek and Roman past. Yet, it was not long before this craving for life-affirming art was transformed into the soulless ideology of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich.