California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://www.jfkessler.com/

Books on Amazon:

An Egyptian Bondage and Other Stories
Face Of Creation
Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu'l-'Ayn
Siren Songs & Classical Illusions
Christmas Carols and Other Plays
Collected Poems
Our Bearings at Sea: A Novel-In-Poems
Rapid Transit
Tataga's Children
Sophocles, 2 : King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• The Second Book of the Tao
  Posted on 20 Jul 2009 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Religion
  

  The principle idea at the core of Existentialism was the denial of Descartes’ I think, therefore I am. Instead it was, I act, therefore I am. As for fishing, Thoreau never tells us what sort of fish there are, or were in his stream; nor if he ever caught anything. It was the fishing that was his active thought, and that sky full of pebbled stars was where his thought was actively cast. That is poetry, and it is untranslatable as paraphrase or a set of maxims. Whereas the sort of profundities Stephen Mitchell sets down in this book — neatly-designed and printed withal — are for this reader rebarbative.

• The Travels of Marco Polo Translated by W. Marsden
  Posted on 14 Jul 2009 in Biography, China, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  It seems that world is more fantastic than our own travel brochures today can suggest for comfortable tourists. There has never been such an extensive realm, nor one with such an incredible structure of rapid communication over thousands of miles. Commerce thrived from Persia to Java, and one reason that may account for it, was order — and a flat tax of 10%. The law was strict and strictly administered everywhere, which was a marvel to Polo, in comparison with fractious Europe.

• Whatever — Whatever?
  Posted on 30 Jun 2009 in Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  One wades through an awful lot of pretentious chatter published when a new production of a work like “Waiting for Godot” is mounted. But what work is ever like Samuel Beckett’s excruciating 2-Act masterpiece? An English friend of mine, a literary scholar and sharp theater critic who has passed most of his life in Cambridge, detests that writer’s work. Although recently widowed and cast into the slough of desolation, he quotes from Godot in an e-mail when it is a matter of trying to describe his state of mind in his mid-Seventies since he was left waiting for …?

• Who is Rita, What Was She?
  Posted on 22 Apr 2009 in Movies, Movies & TV, Politics
  

  Rita murmured in that, silky, sultry voice from so very long ago, “Enough crap, big boy. Let’s get out of here!” She slid off her stool and thrust her arm under mine. I heard whispered words somewhere inside my head, O, heart, be still! The best I could manage was a stammer, “Miss Hayworth, I came with my wife. That’s her there, with Margo and Eddie.”

• Deaf Sentence by David Lodge
  Posted on 07 Oct 2008 in Death, Disability, Fiction Reviews
  

  Reflecting on DEAF SENTENCE, the reader can hear the echoes of awful laughter — that silent cacchination encountered everywhere in Beckett’s writing — which characterizes our present lot, with its extended, often forcibly prolonged, old age. Lodge’s transparent prose plays out in a sophisticated informal, everyday voice; his is artful writing that succeeds in that most difficult literary genre, Comedy.

• The Cape May Stories by Robert C.S. Downs
  Posted on 04 Jun 2008 in Fiction Reviews, Short Stories
  

  Rare in our time, the writing in THE CAPE MAY STORIES is superb, even magical in its clear-sighted modesty of style, one that implicitly offers in plenitude, examples of decency. A surprising, and exhilarating, visit to Cape May awaits readers.

• What the Gospels Meant by Garry Wills
  Posted on 15 Apr 2008 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion
  

  And if Wills reads as persuasive, it is to himself, if not quite to this reader. Taking his stand before the time of St. Ireænus seems somewhat risky to me, if not downright reckless. I did, however, reflect that there yet remains powerful in this late hour of the West’s history a persistent if unacknowledged ambition of theologians per se to legislate for that cowran, tim’rous beastie, mankind. Granted, in our tradition we have Moses to thank for their vocation.

• Comrade J by Pete Earley
  Posted on 24 Jan 2008 in Biography, Espionage, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Russia
  

  It was the goings-on, the kleptocracy that emerged, the sheer blatant thuggery of Putin’s entourage, the vandalism and looting that commenced after 1989, related by Tretyakov, that finally discouraged him, a professional through and through and a Russian patriot. The principles that led to his flight into the cloaking arms of the CIA and FBI are suggestive: leaving behind all his property and possessions, amounting to about two million dollars, was worth it because in his view Russia was ruined and things had gone beyond any hope of redemption in his lifetime. He wanted his daughter to grow up a free woman.

• Crossing Styx
  Posted on 30 Oct 2007 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Psychology
  

  What happens to children is that they usually pass from believing that everything presented by television is real to a later conviction that “nothing is real.” In other words, the world has become crowded, permeated and possessed by the fictive.

• Plucked from Perdition: One Who Lived To Tell Her Tale
  Posted on 05 Sep 2007 in Great Britain, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  I was told in Prague at midday that I had to be at the Wilson Station at 5 pm that afternoon, to take only one small suitcase and nothing which could identify me, not even newspaper as wrapping. At the station, the lady explained through an interpreter (another refugee living in the same house as my mother), I would see people I knew, but I should on no account appear to know them.