California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://www.squamcreativeservices.com/

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Baby Jesus Pawn Shop by Lucia Orth
  Posted on 10 Dec 2008 in Fiction Reviews, Southeast Asia
  

  So let me begin by saying Orth is a very talented writer. She has an eye for detail and a knack for imagery. In her tale of a Filipino and a Westerner coming to grips with the dictatorial landscape of a Marcos-era Philippines, she saturates our minds with sights and senses.

• Casanova by Ian Kelly
  Posted on 03 Dec 2008 in Biography, Italy, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sex, Theatre
  

  Ah, Casanova. Men want to be him, and women want to be with him. Or is it the other way around? He’s Romeo with cojones, Bond without the Beretta, a man more sinned with than sinning. In the annals of sexual conquest, there has seldom been a more entertaining and knowing chronicler. Casanova, according to Casanova, was a legend.

• Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America by Meredith Mason Brown
  Posted on 16 Nov 2008 in Biography, History, Military, Native American, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  It was brutal stuff. Massacres, scalpings, crops burned, winters with only salted meat to eat – and this on both sides. Again Boone survived this melee, but it took a great deal of guile to do it. When his daughter Jemima was kidnapped by a Cherokee and Shawnee war party, for instance, he needed his backwoods know-how to track them down quickly and shoot the offenders.

• Résistance by Agnès Humbert
  Posted on 28 Oct 2008 in France, History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The early resistors soon discover that the Nazis don’t view their activities with similar lightheartedness. Oblivious to the reason why a German car might be parked outside the hospital her mother is in, Humbert walks straight into hell. A member of the Gestapo has infiltrated and betrayed their group, and she and her friends are rounded up for a show trial. It is only April 1941. What follows is an account that tests our 21st century belief in rationalism.

• Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 by Annie Proulx
  Posted on 19 Oct 2008 in Fiction Reviews, Short Stories
  

  Things are never fine just they way they are in Annie Proulx’s new collection of Wyoming stories. Women imperil themselves on mountains, animals go tits-up in ditches, young and old end up blighted or dead. Even the Devil can’t quite seem to make things work. Life is tough, Proulx says, and I ain’t peddling corn syrup.

• How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišic
  Posted on 02 Oct 2008 in Balkans, Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
  

  Yet it is no accident that Aleksandar begins with an account of death, nor is it an accident that he wishes himself a magician, able to wave a wand and make things okay again. For tucked in the lines of his narrative we hear ominous rumblings, like shellfire in the distance. Communism is discredited, nationalist sentiment is on the rise.

• The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
  Posted on 17 Sep 2008 in Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
  

  Of course, the reason the affable Dubus was feeding strippers $20 from his writing fellowship becomes a little clearer when one reads the book – the tale of an exotic dancer in Florida whose life intersects with one of the hijackers of 9/11.

• The Dancer Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Dancers by Rose Eichenbaum
  Posted on 08 Sep 2008 in Dance, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  In fact, the only one who doesn’t fall in with this uplifting sentiment is, God bless her, Shirley MacLaine. With a fabulous display of grande dame orneriness, she even takes Eichenbaum to task for trying to make something monumental out of the whole idea. Exploring the dancer within? Bah humbug.

• The Count of Concord by Nicholas Delbanco
  Posted on 18 Aug 2008 in Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
  

  Sir Benjamin Thompson, a.k.a. Count Rumford, is probably most familiar to modern ears as the inventor of the Rumford Fireplace. Yet that honorarium does not begin to cover the career – tinkerer, teacher, soldier, and spy – of this poster child of the Enlightenment.

• A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
  Posted on 06 Aug 2008 in Archeology, History, Native American, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Gold, jewels – that was what the new world promised and that was what the Spanish demanded. It is the same paradox that had English settlers starving on the shore while lobsters scuttled underfoot. If it wasn’t what they had imagined, it didn’t exist.