RaveNational Book ReviewA great weave of many yarns: a naval adventure for fans of Patrick O’Brian, a story of seafaring for armchair navigators, a tale of men in adversity for moral philosophers, an account of printing and publishing for book historians and a great read for all of us tossed around on the waves of our \'post-truth\' society.
Dorothy Wickenden
PositiveThe National Book ReviewUneven sources might help explain why The Agitators is sometimes hard to follow. We simply know more about some pieces of the story than we do about others ... A journalist...steers the past into a narrow channel and lets her actors come alive. That is what Wickenden has done with The Agitators—told a story that captures both the small world of women’s households and the big events unfolding in Philadelphia, Washington, Seneca Falls, Kansas, and Harper’s Ferry. The historian in me bristled a bit when I first read the book: I wanted Wickenden to step back and tell me what it all means. But no. That’s not her job. She’s a reporter working on the past, and she’s taken us back to her discovery of three women buried in Auburn’s cemetery. Read her book and come along on my post-pandemic pilgrimage to Auburn, New York.
Janice P. Nimura
RaveThe National Book Review... compelling ... Nimura gives their history the complexity it deserves, setting their lives and ambitions in the unsettled world of the early nineteenth-century United States ... Nimura’s gift is to use the Blackwell family’s writings to set us down in the thick of things and then move us through the world as the Blackwells saw it, with all the struggle and uncertainty that shaped their lives. Nimura is a remarkable biographer and sits gracefully in the background and lets characters speak and act ... beautifully written ... Beyond the Blackwell family, Nimura has recruited a generous cast and captured the reformist tumult of the American 1840s ... [a] wonderful book.
Rachel Cohen
RaveThe National Book Review... a complicated hybrid of a book that mixes Cohen’s singular insight into Austen as a writer with Cohen’s personal life ... The book’s ten chapters offer an artful mix of Cohen’s life, Austen’s life, the lives of Austen’s characters, and the insights of writers and critics who, in the two centuries since Austen’s books appeared, have uncovered the riches of her novels ... As a memoir, Austen Years has a guarded feel that can hold a reader at arm’s length. No doubt, it’s challenging to give characters enough heft to settle them into the minds of strangers without violating their privacy. Along these lines, Cohen has made some quirky choices, referring to her children by their initials, for example. Read the dedication and you can give them names ... Set aside the reserved tone of the memoir. Cohen’s Austen Years offers us a moving and intelligent guide to reading Austen in our days of death.
Miles Harvey
MixedThe National Book ReviewReaders of Harvey’s first two books know that he’s a remarkable sleuth, a writer with a passion for maps and islands and the patience to tell a complicated story ... I had a harder time finding Harvey in The King of Confidence. I missed Harvey, the intrepid reporter, often brave and sometimes baffled. That adventurer’s voice has gone quiet in The King of Confidence. Harvey tells us he took up this story at the urging of an editor. But he never tells us why. He also doesn’t explain what appealed to him in the story or what he learned from it or why Strang might help us navigate these years when stories of a con-man-in-charge again dominate our news cycles ... The great surprise of Harvey’s book isn’t a revelation of some polished truth about Strang, the sanctimonious rascal who occupies the center of the book as a kind of moral vacuum. Strang is as slippery now as he was in 1850. Instead, Harvey has spun out amazing connections to just about everything and everyone present in Strang’s world ... Harvey shows us just how Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Twain shared Strang’s imagined world.
Lulu Miller
RaveThe National Book ReviewJordan is the central figure in Lulu Miller’s small marvel of a book ... Jordan is hardly a household name, but, trust me, the book has payoffs aplenty and you’ll get a glimpse of ideas from philosophy, psychology, and contemporary taxonomy ... Miller has more room to play on the pages of her book, where she puts that radio-prose style to good use, leading readers along with amiable chatter but then pulling up short at the edge of something sad, shocking, brutal, horrifying, profound or just uncomfortably personal. Why Fish Don’t Exist is full of those jittery surprises.
Jon Mooallem
PositiveThe National Book ReviewMooallem likes elaborate titles, but he’s an elegant writer, a fine chronicler of disaster and a smart student of the ironies and contradictions of contemporary culture ... [a] humane book with a soulful story.
Casey Cep
PositiveThe National Book ReviewCep, a fiercely smart and generous writer, takes up the Maxwell story and follows it into the deeper mysteries of Harper Lee ... Cep’s a reporter, historian, and philosopher. And a very good writer. She has a marvelous ability to conjure worlds out of words and the patience to trace an Alabama landscape transformed by a dam, to follow a black soldier home from World War II, into his work in the mills and out onto the pulpits of country revivals ... On page after page, Cep brings a remarkable imagination to the work of solving the problems Furious Hours raises. It’s fascinating to watch her muscle together two very different stories—the story of Maxwell and his murderous ways and the story of Lee and her literary frustrations. The book is a tribute to Lee but it is also a record of Cep’s wide reading and wonderfully encyclopedic knowledge ... I’ll give her credit: she’s transformed a world into words and made her blank pages into an unusually smart book.
Kathryn Harrison
PositiveThe National Book ReviewI’ve got to hand it to Kathryn Harrison. She’s a prolific, smart and fearless writer ... the delight of this book lies in her relationship with these grandparents—marvels of experience, patience and knowledge whose stories set her off to become a writer ... Harrison’s story is ordinary and extraordinary. She conjures a wonderful girl’s voice to capture the peculiar misalignments of her family. On Sunset is a loving story that just might redeem what was hateful in The Kiss.
Susan Orlean
RaveThe National Book Review\"The Library Book is a book for every reader and every writer. It’s a masterful tribute to libraries, and, even better, it has a plot and a storyline ... A few years ago, at a sorry moment for public institutions, I decided to give money to the branch libraries of the New York Public Library. Libraries have never hurt anyone, I thought. Finishing The Library Book, I’ll double my donation.\
Yunte Huang
RaveThe National Book Review\"...an excellent addition to a shelf of books on the lives and cultural afterlives of the Siamese Twins ... Along the way, Huang offers something of a master class in how to turn notations in a financial ledger into an outline of cultural history ... Learned and playful, Inseparable draws on Huang’s personal experiences and his astonishing literary and historical knowledge.\
Cullen Murphy
PositiveThe National Book ReviewWe learn a lot from Cullen Murphy about how cartoonists worked, plotted their stories, sharpened their pencils and polished their gags ... Murphy’s book is a visual record of a particular time and place. The world was done in by newspaper strikes, by changing technology, politics, and culture. But if you grew up, like I did, caught up in the stories of Sunday comics, you’ve passed hours in 'Cartoon Country.'
Joan Didion
RaveThe National Book ReviewDidion’s notes describe the standard stuff of southern road trips: dusty towns, gas stations, motel pools, Confederate flags, bourbon, kudzu, swamps and snakes. In fact, lots of snakes … Of course, the Civil Rights Movement gnaws along the edges of Didion’s notes. It’s the real reason behind her trip, the prompt for her questions, and the implicit context for much of what she sees. Sheriff Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace are on her mind … Didion’s storied writer’s life also gives these notes a special interest. Think of them as something like an artist’s sketchbook—a chance to watch Didion at work.
