California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://calitreview.com

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Jennifer Sey on the Harsh World of Elite Gymnastics
  Posted on 02 Jun 2008 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sports
  

  From what I witnessed, and certainly in my experience, many of the high level coaches in the 80s deployed a particularly tough approach that would be considered by outsiders to the sport, emotional abuse. As a participant, the seemingly ‘aggressive’ tactics just seemed like the norm. And I just got used to it. It didn’t seem especially awful at the time as it is what most of my friends were also going through.

• Arizona’s Kartchner Caverns
  Posted on 05 May 2008 in Nature, Non-Fiction Reviews, Travel
  

  “Tufts and Tenen saw themselves as guardians of the cave. They were extremely concerned that their discovery could be looted and destroyed, as had happened to other caves in southern Arizona. They were determined to preserve its pristine quality. They became obsessed with secrecy, and hired a lawyer to write out a legally binding secrecy document that they insisted that anyone whom they had any reason to tell about the cave must sign. Tenen even made his future wife sign a secrecy document on their second date!”

• Christina Binkley on Las Vegas and the Gaming Industry
  Posted on 10 Apr 2008 in Business, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  “At Wynn Las Vegas, for instance, there is a special and very luxurious entrance for guests who pay, or are invited to stay in the “Tower Suites”—hotel rooms that are no larger or different than the rest of the hotel other than that they have this special entrance and more intimate front desk. The swimming pool for these suites is literally above and overlooking the pool for regular folk—so Tower Suite guests can look down on the hoi polloi. In fact, the whole resort has been designed to allow these patrons to move around in their own private sphere.”

• Parag Khanna Discusses The Second World
  Posted on 04 Mar 2008 in Africa, China, Economics, India, Japan, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Russia
  

  “Around the entire world what I see is Europe and China investing into and buying greater shares of foreign economies—and thus gaining significant political and even military leverage over them—at our expense. Power has to be a fair balance among a range of tools, including the military, in order to be used effectively. We’re not doing that now, and I don’t see a good strategy coming out of Washington as to how to do it better.”

• Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
  Posted on 17 Jan 2008 in Mythology, Non-Fiction Reviews, Psychology
  

  “In waking we tend to think The Dream vanishes, evaporates in daylight like morning dew on grass. But it doesn’t. The unsettling Matrix-esque truth here is that we all live in world-simulations, pretty much all of the time. The brain isn’t out in the world; it’s locked in a dark box in your head. Patterns of information ting against our senses and get routed into the brain for model assembly. One of the core insights of the science of perception is our models of the world are heavily interpreted—our own expectations and cultural mores and personal history shape “The Real,” so that in some ways our personal little submarines move through an ocean of our own making.”

• Liberal Fascism? Jonah Goldberg Explains
  Posted on 08 Jan 2008 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
  

  “If I had to pick a single overall theme in the book, I would say it’s to rectify the misunderstanding of what fascism is and to highlight the deep historical, ideological and emotional ties between progressivism (now called liberalism) and fascism.”

• Murdered by Mumia: A Conversation With Maureen Faulkner
  Posted on 03 Jan 2008 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, True Crime
  

  “The man lifted his arm and fired a single shot in Danny’s back. Danny was able to turn and fire one return shot at Abu-Jamal that hit him in the abdomen. Danny then fell onto the sidewalk. Mumia Abu-Jamal approached him as he lay unarmed and wounded on the ground and pointed his 5 shot Charter Arms revolver at Danny. He fired three more shots at him; two pierced his jacket but did not hit him. Jamal then moved closer, bent down and placed his gun to within 6 inches of Danny’s face. He fired his final shot into Danny’s forehead and the bullet came to rest in his brain.”

• Four Shipwrecked Castaways Cross Sixteenth Century America
  Posted on 19 Dec 2007 in History, Native American, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  “But at that point most of the expeditionaries perished as a result of Indian attacks, illness, and starvation. In fact, several expedition members resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Eventually, out of three hundred men comprising the original land contingent, only four survived. These four castaways remained as slaves of the coastal Indians of Texas for six years until they finally made their escape into what is now northeast Mexico.”

• Hanna Rosin Discusses God’s Harvard
  Posted on 09 Oct 2007 in Education, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Religion
  

  “Tensions often arise between secular teachings and Biblical beliefs. Many students are reading, say Kant and Nietzsche for the first time. They may be alarmed, but they also may find those writers intoxicating.”

• Michael Behe on The Edge of Evolution
  Posted on 24 Sep 2007 in Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion, Science
  

  “I conclude that Darwinian processes account for little of the machinery of life, and that most positive evolution must be nonrandom — guided somehow — and I argue that result fits well with the fine-tuning of the universe discovered by physics.”