“The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law … Comey’s book fleshes out the testimony he gave before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 with considerable emotional detail, and it showcases its author’s gift for narrative … The volume offers little in the way of hard news revelations about investigations by the F.B.I. or the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III…What A Higher Loyalty does give readers are some near-cinematic accounts of what Comey was thinking.”
-Michiko Kakutani on James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty (The New York Times)
*
“The ‘histories’ of the title are both national and personal. With the scrupulous intelligence and meditative intensity that define all this author’s work, the stories move from subjects like the Civil War and Nat Turner’s rebellion to Mr. Wideman’s family’s tribulations, the two threads twining so intricately that they’re impossible to separate. … Mr. Wideman’s explicit subject is racial injustice but his treatment of it quietly deepens into existential horror … There is perhaps no more frightening emotion than despair, especially when felt with clarity and intellectual rigor. This, then, is not a book for the unwary. Mr. Wideman possesses a true and terrible vision of the tragic.”
-Sam Sacks on John Edgar Wideman’s American Histories (The Wall Street Journal)
*
“Whether guns were the deciding factor without which England would not have industrialized is open to question. Satia does not hang her thesis on precisely this point; instead she marshals an overwhelming amount of evidence to show, comprehensively, that guns had a place at the center of every conventional tale historians have so far told about the origins of modern, industrialized world—cultural, scientific, organizational, economical, and political … The context of such debates has changed, in part as gun technology and gun use have changed. This book leaves us with the disquieting notion that guns—whether the slow and inaccurate weapons of the eighteenth century or today’s models—do more than alternately cloak or expose human inclination towards violence. They also shape it—not just at the individual level, as we are accustomed to debating, but at the societal, even civilizational or global, level as well. ‘As we make objects, they make us.'”
-Heather Souvaine Horn on Priya Satia’s Empire of Guns (The New Republic)
*
“Lightman does not possess Calvino’s structural rigor, his brilliant hold on irony as the defining principle of the human condition, but his discursive method is full of insight into some of the mysteries of the physical world, as well as the physics of mystery. He uses his own biography – the little science lab he created in his bedroom closet in Memphis, Tennessee, aged 12 – to demonstrate an intact sense of wonder at what we know and what we don’t. At the heart of his mediation is this neat formulation of the boundaries of scientific understanding: ‘The infinite is not merely a lot more of the finite.’ Lightman has a sympathetic gift for recreating the leaps of faith in scientific advance … At the same time, he feels himself in a wonderland of shifting scales. He maps out the heavens, concentrates on the veins of a leaf, tries to fathom the evolution of the humming bird, the veracity of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and returns often to the thrilling chutzpah of Einstein rethinking time and space. Does he end up much the wiser after this latest record of attention to his pattern-making mind? Of course not. Does that make the effort of tracking his progress worthwhile? Of course.”
-Tim Adams on Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (The Guardian)
*
“…the stories are uniformly brilliant … I don’t know what happened during that long break between the first and second collections, but McGuane has emerged a master of the short story. However close together the bulk of these pieces were written, Cloudbursts is clearly the product of a life’s worth of thought and feeling and experience; it ought to be savored. That said, if you find yourself tearing through the book like a flash flood washing out a dirt road, I say go for it … As many of his characters come to realize in these wise and moving stories, the blessing and the curse of a vast landscape is to have yourself for company. That’s no less true on the range than on the sea. A man can outrun all kinds of things, at least for a while, but never himself.”
-Justin Taylor on Thomas McGuane’s Cloudbursts (The New York Times Book Review)
