RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... a visionary map through places few of us will ever experience ... Language, Underland seems to say, is the imperfect tool for the work of the Anthropocene. But it is also what we have. Macfarlane’s language is inventive and restless, blending things wrought by people and other, grander, slower forces. It is a book in which ice sweats and stone pulses ... We surface from its pages covered in a residue of feeling, of dread, loss, tenderness, and terrible hope. This perhaps is the wild edge of Macfarlane’s ambition: to take English and use it to re-enchant our world ... a profound guide to literally feeling the Earth. Underland, from its formal inventiveness to the striking elegance of its prose, opens its readers to a new mode of perception; we see ourselves not as we are now but as the ancestors we will become. Such emotion is its own kind of argument, a way of seeing in the dark.
Adam Higginbotham
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe explosion at Reactor Number Four comes early in Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham’s compulsively readable forensic recounting of the disaster. The first 80 pages are an elegant tour through the Soviet civilian nuclear program ... Higginbotham’s descriptions of nuclear design and the behavior of isotopes are blessedly clear .. Midnight in Chernobyl is written in a tight temporal mode: the clock-ticking buildup, explosion, attempts to keep the reactor contained, hospital wards and displaced families, and, finally, the trials of plant managers, sentenced in proceedings almost Stalinist in their showiness. The result is as haunting as cinema.
