PositiveThe Wall Street JournalCoyote offers intimate shadings on a story that will be familiar to fans of literary biography or anyone who has ever attended a 12-step recovery program ... The author...puts his subject’s journal entries and family correspondences to good use ... Mr. Dowling is a discerning and sympathetic, if occasionally starchy, guide through Shepard’s oeuvre. The connections to O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, in particular, ring true ... While this volume digs deeper still into the mind and adventures of the playwright, eight years gone, you get the sense that there’s more to come.
RaveThe Wall Street JournalDisquieting ... Mr. Cohen is a discerning guide through a chain of events that unfold with the numbing inevitability of a bad movie ... Mr. Cohen steadies the grim churn of events with tact and underlying moral revulsion ... Mr. Cohen’s gifts as a storyteller are ample.
Bill Zehme
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAn impressionistic, besotted portrait that has the obsessiveness of your favorite deep-dive podcast ... Zehme leans into Carson’s incongruities with unconcealed pleasure. Zehme made his reputation writing about celebrities for Rolling Stone and Esquire with discursive brio and high style ... An ode to an inscrutable man, a thoughtful appreciation for how Carson’s televised presence reassured a nation as he sent us off to dreamland.
