MixedThe Times Literary Supplement...not only exhaustively researched, but also visceral and vivid ... Reading Three Women, you could be forgiven for suspecting that male callousness has a tender female analogue: the women Taddeo follows are desperately in love with their male partners or abusers, and their desire has a quavering quality ... Taddeo’s dramatic revelations shed light on why her subjects might clamber so hopelessly for male approval or acquiesce so readily to their lovers’ demands. But sometimes it seems as though the tragic anecdotes in Three Women serve primarily as signifiers of a legible form of femininity: that is to say, what seems to unify Taddeo’s three women is just that they are wounded in familiar ways ... There are few fresh revelations here ... If we really hope to license women to expand their sexual repertoires, we might do better to depict less familiar kinds of sex, or even less typical forms of victimization. The term \'female desire\' is meaningless precisely because there are as many desires as there are women. The relatively homogeneous sample presented in Three Women speaks for only a few.
John Kaag
PositiveThe AtlanticHiking With Nietzsche explores two related but distinct reckonings with the blandishments of modern life, Kaag’s and Nietzsche’s ... Blending biography, intellectual history, and personal essay, Kaag follows three related journeys: Nietzsche’s evolution from adolescent upstart to middle-aged iconoclast, Kaag’s youthful attempt to retrace Nietzsche’s footsteps through the Swiss Alps, and Kaag’s adult effort to retrace his own retracing, this time with Hay and their 3-year-old daughter in tow. The result is not just an approachable introduction to Nietzsche’s thought. Kaag’s book is also, despite its cloying title, a confirmation that philosophy thrives when it provides an antidote to the wholesome doldrums of sanity.
Julian Barnes
PanThe Washington PostBarnes’s belletristic approach is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of this collection. His writing is arresting, but his thought is marked by methodological inconsistencies.
