PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewEnlightening ... Nuanced ... Garber is confident that literature continues to lie in wait for demagogues and authoritarians ... Much as I admire this sentiment, I also fear that it arises from nostalgia for a culture that, however divided it may have been in other ways, held literature in common as a source of value and an object of reverence.
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewYou will find many astonishing sentences in The Secret of Secrets... The hyperactive plotting runs on hyperventilating prose ... But a Dan Brown caper also runs on a certain kind of intellectual fuel ... Briskly didactic and easily checkable, if sometimes of questionable relevance. It’s nice to encounter a writer willing to do some of your Googling for you ... The Secret of Secrets worked for me less as an idea-driven whodunit or an exercise in soft-core travel porn than as a wistful testament to the power of the printed word ... Made me nostalgic for a golden age when a single written work could not only sell millions of copies, but also galvanize public opinion.
Bob Woodward
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"This is harrowing, riveting stuff, even if you know how it will play out. The problem, though, is that we don’t really know. Since the book’s completion, Russia has been on the offensive again in Ukraine. The Middle East conflict has widened to include Hezbollah and Iran, an outcome that Biden and his team spend many pages working to prevent. Meanwhile, the election campaigns of Trump and Harris hurtle forward. Three weeks after War is published on Oct. 15, voters will provide raw material for the sequel. Though he specializes in real-time suspense, Woodward doesn’t write cliffhangers. His impulse — his talent — is to impose an arc and a moral on the mess and sprawl of very recent history. This time around, his stated conclusions are unambiguous: \'Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency,\' he writes, \'he is unfit to lead the country.\' In contrast, \'Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.\' Those judgments sound authoritative. They also sound wishful.\
Linn Ullmann Trans. by Thilo Reinhold
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"For readers anticipating a book-length gossip-column blind item — or a score-settling peek into the intimate lives of famous people — Unquiet may be disappointing ... The rueful humor... is typical of Ullmann’s prose, which is plain, succinct and declarative, with currents of intensity flowing beneath the placid surface. The effect, in Thilo Reinhard’s graceful English translation, is almost Didionesque, as the willed, witty detachment of the narrator’s voice at once conceals and emphasizes the rawness of her emotions ... Unquiet is, well, quieter [than Ullmann’s previous novel, The Cold Song], and also more chaotic, finding drama and pathos in its own search for an adequate form and turning its failures into something fascinating and rich. In the process, it creates — or perhaps discovers — two characters who seem stranger, sadder and more real than the actress and the filmmaker we might have thought we knew...\
Martin Amis
MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"Some of the essays, reviews and reported articles collected in The Rub of Time take Amis’s household-name status as an occasion or a theme. But the deep subject of this book, what holds its disparate bits together and makes it worth your time even if you have only the vaguest idea of who its author is supposed to be, is not celebrity at all. It’s professionalism ... He is especially good at literary criticism. The best parts of The Rub of Time are devoted to his two favorite novelists, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow ... But there is some filler to get through ... Amis’s contempt toward the human material in front of him often feels easy, habitual, unearned, a matter of prejudice rather than experience ... Over time, Amis has learned to read the mainstream without a chart, and to steer clear of the dangerous shoals and ledges. He is a nimble navigator, the wind is gentle at his back and the boat, alas, rarely rocks.\
Michael Chabon
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewToo strict a recipe would have spoiled the charm of this layer cake of nested memories and family legends, which have been arranged with painstaking haphazardness ... Chabon constructs a loving, partial portrait of an unlikely, volatile and durable marriage ... He brings the world of his grandparents to life in language that seems to partake of their essences ... Whatever else it is — a novel, a memoir, a pack of lies, a mishmash — this book is beautiful.
