California Literary Review

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Love Junkie by Rachel Resnick
  Posted on 12 Nov 2008 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Psychology, Sex, Writers
  

  It takes an enormous amount of courage for Resnick to put her life story on the page. Her writing is as stripped, raw and intense as her emotions, and at times you don’t want to read further. But you do, anyway, with a kind of abject horror. The two main men that parade through her life, who ultimately woo, use and abuse her are truly the type of guys your mother would warn you to stay far away from.

• Lisa Alcalay Klug: Releasing Your Inner Heebster
  Posted on 15 Sep 2008 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion
  

  But for now, there is only one book and it’s a book that’s all about shouting loudly and proudly that it’s great to be a Jew. The idea for her book came about following an article she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle back in 2005. “I was writing a feature about how cool it is to be a Jew in San Francisco and I profiled local ‘Heebsters’ as I now call them,” she says.

• Night Swimming – by Robin Schwarz
  Posted on 22 Apr 2007 in Fiction Reviews
  

  What would you do if you went to your doctor for a routine check up only to discover that you had a year left to live?

• How Israel Lost: The Four Questions
  Posted on 22 Apr 2007 in History, Israel, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  There’s an old saying among the Jews that goes something along the lines of: we don’t need others to destroy us, because we’re pretty good destroying ourselves. In other words, the red flags were already up when Richard Ben Cramer a “self-confessed proud Jew and pro-Israel supporter” came along and wrote How Israel Lost – the Four Questions.

• Devil In The Details – by Jennifer Traig
  Posted on 11 Apr 2007 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Psychology
  

  All parents of adolescents despair of them, particularly those with teenage daughters. Endless hours on the telephone, picky eating habits, emotional outbursts.

• Dancing With Einstein by Kate Wenner
  Posted on 11 Apr 2007 in Fiction Reviews
  

  Combining fact with fiction, Kate Wenner’s “Dancing with Einstein” is a carefully crafted novel that manages to wrap a piece of history into beautiful alliterative prose with its portrait of a young woman struggling to make sense of her life.

• Campus Sexpot by David Carkeet
  Posted on 10 Apr 2007 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sex
  

  Naturally, the publishing of this book complete with its intrigue, loose morals, and the real citizens’ names thinly disguised, set the town on its ear.

• About My Sisters – by Debra Ginsberg
  Posted on 10 Apr 2007 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Ginsberg writes in vivid fly-on-the-wall detail about the complex relationships she has with each of her sisters.

• A Chance Meeting: by Rachel Cohen
  Posted on 10 Apr 2007 in Art, Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Photography, Writers
  

  In this, her debut book, Harvard graduate Rachel Cohen weaves a literary tapestry encompassing the lives of 30 of America’s great writers, photographers and artists, into 36 distinct chapters. Part biography, part flight-of-fancy speculation, Cohen’s final product, complete with references, source material, and footnotes was 10 years in the making.

• Mullahs, Mini Skirts and Carson Daly
  Posted on 03 Apr 2007 in History, Iran, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
  

  “Part of the richness of the home culture I come from and what makes it fascinating to work in Iran as a journalist is that I wasn’t an observer. I am culturally of Iran. At the end of the day I’m not going back to a hotel room. I’m going to my aunt’s house or best friend’s house. I’m waking up in the morning to my aunt cooking pancakes.”

• Confessions of a Porn Writer
  Posted on 31 Mar 2007 in Movies, Movies & TV, Sex, Writers
  

  “I had been hired to write a movie for the Playboy channel – soft porn. I didn’t know that Playboy had co-financed it with an adult film company and suddenly there were many different versions of my film.”

• Stripping the Town of Tinsel
  Posted on 30 Mar 2007 in Business, Movies, Movies & TV, Writers
  

  Hilary de Vries The dot com slump, a shift in journalistic standards in the celebrity-driven Hollywood mill, and an overwhelming desire to be honest in her reporting, were the catalysts that propelled award winning Hollywood journalist Hilary de Vries to write her debut novel, “So 5 Minutes Ago” (Random House) which hit bookstands in February. [...]