California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• 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.

• Book Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
  Posted on 21 Sep 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Science Fiction and Fantasy
  

  To label How to Live Safely as a human comedy is a bit of a stretch since many of the major characters are not human at all. These include TAMMY, a computer system with a “kind of sexy” curvilinear pixel configuration and low self-esteem, Phil, a software system copied from Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 and Ed, a non-existent dog who is a “weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection.”

• Book Review: Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America by Erika Lee and Judy Yung
  Posted on 10 Sep 2010 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  For those who fell in the “only” 7 percent category, the decision to deport them was often a death sentence. Several wrenching accounts of suicide are featured in the book, including that of a Chinese woman, waiting to be deported, who rammed a sharpened chopstick through her ear canal into her brain.

• Book Review: The Music Instinct by Philip Ball
  Posted on 01 Sep 2010 in Music, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The amount of factual detail and insights that Ball brings to the themes under discussion is impressive in the extreme. On just one page, in the chapter dealing with rhythm, he weaves relevant examples ranging from Gyorgy Ligeti’s composition used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic work, Kontakte, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Chinese zither music and songs by Australian Aborigines that are accompanied by the clicking of rhythm sticks.

• Book Review: Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith
  Posted on 12 Aug 2010 in Fiction Reviews, Great Britain
  

  The legions of admirers of Smith’s other novels, notably The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, will find a great deal to keep them happily reading Corduroy Mansions. The twist with this book, however, is that it is the print version of the author’s first online novel.

• Art Review: An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing “The Gross Clinic” Anew
  Posted on 27 Jul 2010 in Art, Art & Design
  

  The image of Dr. Gross evoked memories of scenes of carnage which Americans, north and south, were trying to forget. Many were not happy to be reminded. In a controversy lasting over the next few years, newspapers and art journals weighed in, with a growing body of negative judgments deflating Eakins’ hopes of a major triumph. The Art Interchange editorialized that “although vigorously treated…” The Gross Clinic “ought never to have left the dissecting room.” “Power it has,” the New York Times proclaimed, “but very little art.”

• Book Review: Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings
  Posted on 29 Jun 2010 in Great Britain, History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The next two years of the war for Churchill were a harrowing march through what his wife, Clementine called the “valley of humiliation.” Defeats in Greece, in the Battle of Crete and in North Africa in 1941 were followed by the Japanese capture of Singapore in February 1942. That same month, the daring “Channel Dash” by German warships under siege in Cherbourg to their home naval bases stung British pride to its core. Great Britain, the nation of Marlborough, Churchill’s warrior ancestor, and Lord Nelson was losing the war on land and sea.

• Art Review: Late Renoir at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
  Posted on 28 Jun 2010 in Art, Art & Design
  

  In the case of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some were even put up for sale. In 1989, after Renoir’s Reclining Nude (1902) was sold by MOMA, the museum’s chief curator, Kirk Varnedoe, made a comment revealing the extent to which Renoir’s reputation had fallen. ”There are many people who would like the painting very much,” Varnedoe said of Renoir’s Reclining Nude, “but it simply didn’t belong to the story of modern art that we are telling.”

• Book Review: At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union by Robert V. Remini
  Posted on 02 Jun 2010 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  In 1850, the best that Clay could do was to coax Southern politicians to agree to halt the selling of slaves in the District of Columbia. The payback was the Fugitive Slave Act. Nicknamed the “Bloodhound Law,” it legally bound law enforcement officers in the North to assist in the seizure of escaped slaves, punishing anyone who assisted the runaways.

• Book Review: The Songs of Hollywood by Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson
  Posted on 12 May 2010 in Movies, Music, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  For the next few years, Hollywood musicals, climaxing in 42nd Street (1933), would be “backstage” pictures. Songs would be delivered in scenes depicting stage rehearsals, with aspiring singers and hard-bitten producers battling against the odds to “put on a show.” It was fun while it lasted – and big profits for the film studios. But after a few years, audiences grew tired of predictable scenarios of theatrical angst and happy “all singing, all dancing finales.”