RaveBookforumThe Patch is (McPhee\'s) thirty-third book overall. It takes in the whole arc of his long career, assembling recent essays and previously uncollected pieces dating back to the ’50s, and is McPhee’s second victory lap in a row, if we include his idiosyncratic memoir-as-writer’s-manual, Draft No. 4 (2017). It is dedicated to McPhee’s grandchildren—all ten of them, if I’ve counted correctly—and it contains 6.2 pieces per child ... in his own quiet, meticulous way, McPhee’s built a body of work that will stand.
David Grann
RaveBookforum...the strangest, most horrific story that Grann has told ... Grann folds it, neatly, into three hundred pages. But he also makes something much more out of the material—something deep, devastating, and almost unbearably sad. On the one hand, he takes in the entirety of what was done to the Osage and, by extension, to the American Indian. On the other, he paints intimate portraits of men and women who'd murder their husbands, their wives, their own children ... What we're left with are circles of complicity that widen and widen until, terrifyingly, they grow to encompass the reader as well.
