A Review of Werner Herzog's "The Future Truth"

 

Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of Truth is a summation of his life project, all 70+ films, both narrative and documentary, all his other books, all his late-in-life winking appearances, like the one on Parks & Recreation as a monotone depressive who wants to sell his haunted home and move closer to Walt Disney World. For as much as everyone asserts their devotion to the truth, Herzog also knows “there is such a thing as a collective willingness to be transported into the realm of poetry, of madness, and of the pure joy of storytelling.” (What a wickedly beautiful trio that is, no?)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on December 19, 2025.

A Review of "Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson" by Claire Hoffman

 

Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep poking their, in the most recent case, oddly orange-tinged heads up far too often in history. That makes Clarie Hoffman’s steady, insightful biography Sister, Sinner, an examination of the fantastic and tragic life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, all the more timely. An early 20th century powerhouse, McPherson arguably created the first megachurch (what became the Foursquare Church, which still has over 6500 congregations globally today) and was wise enough to be the first woman to preach on the radio, too. Her style of Pentecostal ceremonies featured staged spectacle, from camels to faux police motorcycles, big choirs, some speaking in tongues.

But the most important voice was always Aimee’s. Her goal was to make one’s relationship with the lord more personal—her original magazine from her church was the Song of Solomon inspired The Bridal Call. As Hoffman puts it, “Aimee’s words were a sort of heavenly come-hither, a promise of intimacy with the divine, a lifting up away from all the darkness that was gathering in the world.” But, often drawing her sermons from her life—and what a life it was—“She emphasized her fallibility, always,” Hoffman further explains, “She was prideful and prone to make foolish mistakes, but all of this made her more adorable and magnetic.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on September 5, 2025.

A Review of "What Art Does" by Brian Eno and Bette A.

 

At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” That’s even with its subtitle “An Unfinished Theory” dragging along like tin cans attached to a car, startling everyone. That said, a quick peek inside is even more welcoming. Bette A.’s deceptively naive, you could almost draw them yourself, just beyond line drawings are full of childlike whimsy. The typography is also playful, changing size, color, font, and even fading away. Given the ultra-creative natures of its authors—Eno is a British polymath musician, producer, artist, activist, A. a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher—of course this book about art is art itself.

But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page. Take this run of claims, “We all make art all the time, but we don’t really call it that;” art is “the name for a kind of engagement we have with something;” and, “the art engagement begins where functional engagement ends.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on May 2, 2025.

A Review of "99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life" by Adam Chandler

A few weeks into the oligarchical hell of “Trump II: This Time We Leave the Country Stripped on Blocks,” Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life can seem downright roseate in its desire to consider what work means and how we might re-invent it. One way to think of Chandler’s engaging, thought-provoking book is to compare it to a Last Week with John Oliver: your narrator/host will make some funny jokes at his own expense, will bring the receipts for all the facts and figures carefully chosen to enlighten and not overwhelm, and will follow a pattern of how did we get here/where can we go from this unappealing here. “Writing this makes me feel a bit like the most stoned kid on an ultimate Frisbee team, but America isn’t what we’re told it is,” he confesses in his intro. “I’m not saying anything that you don’t already know.”

Chandler’s false modesty aside—he tells us plenty we don’t know, or perhaps haven’t quite considered via his long-view perspective—no doubt many of us feel snookered by what he bills the “American abracadabra,” that hard work always brings big rewards. As he says, we are meant to believe “anyone who fails to make it here in the Land of Opportunity must not be trying hard enough.” But as he also points out, citing a 2022 study, “35 percent of families in the United States with full-time workers don’t earn enough to cover basic needs such as food, housing, and childcare.” (And that’s all before the current crony capitalists further strip-out Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and then painfully tax everyone’s necessary goods with tariffs.)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 21, 2025.

A Review of "What Nails It" by Greil Marcus

 

Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. For Marcus’s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It—part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures—makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as it of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”

Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting—or discounting—his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meet Sex Pistol punk Johhny (Lydon) Rotten.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 14, 2025.

A Review of "Didion & Babitz" by Lili Anolik

Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz pairs up exemplars of their age to examine how their age let them (and pretty much most women) down. Just as Seligman made the case for an Apollonian Susan Sontag and a Dionysian Pauline Kael, Anolik does the same for the heady, distant Joan Didion and the easily past Dionysus all the way to Bacchus Eve Babitz. This book is not a high-blown literary assessment or simply a twined biography, but cultural criticism told in an engaging, gossipy tone in which Anolik often directly addresses the reader, sets us up for her methods, previews her structure, even offers two versions of one crucial event and then shrugs and says, “You decide.” Didion & Babitz reads as if you and Anolik were cozied up in a red leather booth at Musso & Frank Grill, dishing dirt over bone-dry martinis.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on January 2, 2025.

A Review of "Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show" by Tommy Tomlinson

 

As I was reading Tommy Tomlinson’s Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, something delightful and ridiculous—at least in name—stuck its long schnoz into my lap, demanding pets. It was our silken windhound, a real breed (at least UKC recognized), bred mostly from borzois and whippets to create a smaller borzoi. And sure, Archie’s hair is sweetly soft, and he can run like the wind with that double suspension gallop that sighthounds share, but c’mon. Silken windhound? 

 That is all to say I’m not going to be objective in the least writing about Tomlinson’s book, for I’m a dog person through and through. 

 Of course I’m not alone in that canine love. Tomlinson informs us there’s one dog for every four people in the U.S., just one of the many well-researched tidbits he sprinkles like pills of information hidden inside all the other treats of the book that explore, well, happiness of all things. When he runs through the possible ways wolves evolutionarily decided to play nice with humans—there’s a debate—he ends “we domesticated dogs, and they domesticated us.”

Care to read the rest then do at California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on August 2, 2024.

A Review of "And Then? And Then? What Else?" by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket

 

Given he has previously penned a series of four books called All the Wrong Questions, it’s not surprising author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) would suggest he relishes the frisson of being wrong. He writes: 

That light dawning, that small but potent vertigo as a beautiful idea, taken for granted, falls apart in one’s mind, feels so very essential to the enterprise of literature, not only writing it but reading it and living in a world in which it is written and read. It’s a ticket, being wrong, not only a citation but a way of gaining entrance to something more marvelous and exciting for my not knowing at all what it really is. 

Readers who opt in by picking up his latest, And Then? And Then? What Else? will get to spend 200 pages and change frolicking in Handler’s mind as he struggles to figure out what it really is. It’s a bit of a genre-buster, this book, a sort of memoir in which he’ll do infuriatingly vague things like talk about his time in college without naming where he went (Wesleyan, if you’re interested), describe in detail how he writes while shying away from the writerly phrase process, and lean in to a tradition of many before him, from Didion to Orwell, from David Foster Wallace to Zadie Smith, examining the peculiar compulsion that leads anyone to put words together, thereby, perhaps, helping you do the same.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 26, 2024.

A Review of "The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster" by John O'Connor

 

How much of writing is staring down the dark. (Just ask Dante and his selva oscura.) Of course that also means, how much of life is staring down the dark, knowing that even if we fail or fear to consider it, the dark will swallow us up in the end. So maybe that’s why we want something to be out there, and why not Bigfoot? 

 Here’s one of the nut graphs John O’Connor offers in his lively, thoughtful, funny, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster: 

Whatever mythic yearning monsters fulfill, we’re jonesing hard. Sixty-six million of us, according to a recent survey, profess to believe in just one: Bigfoot. Sixty-six million! As these numbers suggest, it’s not only crackpots who believe. There may be no more sacred expression of American exceptionalism than faith in a monster we’ve adapted to fit our peculiar view of history, unfalsifiable by facts proffered by science or qualified experts, and suggesting a medieval belief in the raw and violent power of nature. Perhaps we all need Bigfoot in our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "The World According to Joan Didion" by Evelyn McDonnell

 

You know you’re in great authorial hands when on page two of this book Evelyn McDonnell insists about her subject Joan Didion, “Narrative was her expertise and her enemy.” Not just a great insight, that line connects the dots between these two powerful women. McDonnell skillfully offers all the lessons she’s learned from years of reading, considering, and teaching (currently journalism at Loyola Marymount University) Didion. So both can wield a rapier thrust of a declarative, quick last sentence of a paragraph. For as McDonnell closes one graph, “For Didion, words were earned, not spent.” Indeed. 

 McDonnell, editor of Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé, Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, is not attempting biography with The World According to Joan Didion, or even a literary biography, but something more attuned to her fascinating subject. It’s an examination of where Didion met the world on the page, read through a series of Didion totems that function as chapter titles, such as Gold, Notebook, Stingray, Jogger, Morgue, Orchid. For what better way to honor Didion than with a collection of essays?

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

The review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on March 21, 2024.

A Review of "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant

 

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography sold nearly 230K copies in its first eight weeks in stores and is currently at #47 in Books at Amazon. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech sits at #17,280 in Books. That’s just one way to say our fascination with the mighty always trumps (verb chosen advisedly) our interest in history’s “losers.” The Luddites have been pummeled so badly by history we don’t even use the term accurately. 

So it’s fortunate Merchant has written this engaging corrective that leans into rightfully earned polemic in its final chapters. Merchant, a Los Angeles Times technology columnist and author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, sets himself to a difficult task, for the Luddites have been misrepresented and slandered since they first took hammer to power looms in England in the 1810s. Even today, as he points out, a Google search will tell you a Luddite is “small-minded” and “resists progress.”

Care to read the rest then do so at California Review of Books.

A Review of "The Last Days of Roger Federer"

 

Some lines from Robert Christgau about Lloyd Cole have always stuck with me: “So what if he can’t stop talking about books and movies and gathers his material on day trips from his walkup flat? Does that make him so different from you?” I was reminded of those lines while reading Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer, as it’s a book replete with ruminations about books, movies, art, music, drugs, and, yes, tennis, thematically tied by the biggest baddie of all—death. Or, as Dyer puts it, “quitting,” but that simple word can mean so many things. 

Now, if my first sentence, dropping in both a rock critic who himself is famous for his often cryptic, ever epigrammatic reviews and a semi-obscure musician (his best known tune, “Are You Ready to be Heartbroken?” might be the most famous because Camera Obscura wrote the answer song, “Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken”) was off-putting, this Dyer book might not be for you. For that’s often his method, allusive to the point it’s easy to feel you need an auxiliary reading list to school yourself to read The Last Days and be fully rewarded. The odds are good you won’t have enough days to accomplish your assignment.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Orwell's Roses"

 

Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses as a whydunit. Beyond admitting how much he influenced her as a writer/journalist/activist, Solnit was also moved to learn of the rose bushes Orwell planted by his countryside English cottage in Wallington. Planting fruit trees made a certain practical sense, but roses fed no one. 

 That would be the too facile conclusion one might have before reading Solnit’s lovely, hopeful book. Despite relatively harrowing, clear-eyed passages about our current climate crisis and about the vicious Stalin-led starving of Ukraine in the 1930s, Solnit also succeeds at what she claims Orwell accomplishes. Both calm yet crusading writers help us witness “imperfect and unidealized beauty.” That is, see the world we live in.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 25, 2025.

A Review of "To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno" by Dinty W. Moore

 

If you’ve even wondered why the hell we came up with hell, this is the book for you. Dinty W. Moore knows of hell well, and in all sorts of ways— among his many books are The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth about Internet Culture in 1995 when future Facebook cyborg Mark Zuckerberg was only 11 and the genre-busting memoir Between Panic and Desire in 2008. But most of all Moore’s a recovering Catholic, so of course much of what he finds between panic and desire is guilt. Not to give away the book’s ending (we all die and who knows what happens) but check out Moore’s Index to espy the tone of the book: Augustine, Dante, Organized Religion, and Original Sin are the only items indexed. And the pages flagged for this fearsome foursome are for subjects like “makes us cringe,” “makes us doubt our worth,” “makes us loathe our very existence.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.