RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPamela Rush didn’t get the home she deserved. She tried ... Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental activist who was recently awarded a MacArthur \'genius\' grant, tells Rush’s story in Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. The book spotlights an unpleasant and complicated problem — the lack of proper waste sanitation in rural America — and the phenomenal toll it takes on public health and dignity ... Flowers brings an invigorating sense of purpose to the page. Waste is written with warmth, grace and clarity. Its straightforward faith in the possibility of building a better world, from the ground up, is contagious.
Jodie Adams Kirshner
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewKirshner, a research professor at New York University, has taught bankruptcy law, and one wishes for more of the cleareyed analysis that appears in her prologue and epilogue ... Kirshner understands better than most how bankruptcy is a tool, one she argues public officials should not mistake for a solution ... In showcasing people who are persistent, clever, flawed, loving, struggling and full of contradictions, Broke affirms why it’s worth solving the hardest problems in our most challenging cities in the first place.
Dominic Smith
PositiveThe Chicago TribuneIt's a testament to Smith's skillful plotting and effortless prose that the novel's intricate form emerges only in retrospect...Though the characters' realizations about their motives are at times belabored, the shifting perspectives of The Last Painting keep epiphanies from feeling too neat. Both melancholy and defiant, Smith's novel leaves us with the sense that the truths we make are no less valuable for being inexact.
