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Recent Reviews
Dean Jobb
Pan The Washington Post For all the flickering diamonds and worsted suits, for all the references to Barry as a prince or aristocrat of thieves, it’s the story of a dissolute, empty and shallow life, too much of it spent in prison, that wears thin pretty fast ... The chapters are short, the energy propulsive, the research prodigious ... But if this aspires to be a big book, there’s not much big here.
Randall Sullivan
Pan The Washington Post One big, sloppy mess that is written strictly from the perspective of the minority of humankind who call themselves Christians ... There are hints along this crooked journey that Sullivan was as confused while writing his book as I was reading it.
John O'Connor
Positive The Washington Post There’s some great stuff here. About myth and imagination. About the power and importance of wilderness and wildness to the human psyche. About belief, and the lies our own eyes relay to us each and every day. But The Secret History of Bigfoot is a frustrating read. The Bigfooters O’Connor hangs out with come across as overgrown adolescent nitwits desperate for fellowship and purpose ... Ultimately, though, the hunt for Bigfoot reveals much about the poverty of the American psyche. Or, at least, the poverty of the American male psyche, which can’t seem to distinguish between fact and fiction.
Jonathan Raban
Rave The Washington Post The chapters on his parents are so distant from that in time, culture and feeling that the whole seems disjointed and pointless ... At first, that is; until, bit by bit, something remarkable and beautiful and ever so subtle grows, and Father and Son becomes Raban’s finest and most moving book ...A life ending, a life beginning. Father and son. I wept.
Brad Fox
Rave The Washington Post This is no straightforward narrative but a book built from scraps that belie its intricate engineering ... A kind of yearning dream, a tossing and turning in your bed in the night.
Susan Casey
Positive The Washington Post A sober, daytime, conventionally structured narrative about exploring the deep by manned submersible, made personal by Casey’s quest to descend to the depths herself ... A fine tour of the history and challenges of exploring this most fantastical and forbidding of earthen worlds.
Will Grant
Positive The Washington Post It sounds pretentious but isn’t, because Grant is no city-slicker wannabe or Instagram influencer ... At moments I wished Grant would step back a bit, try to make sense of everything — his journey, the landscape, the nation of which it’s such a storied part — to connect the dots and bring a kind of meaning to this West he’s taking us through, but he’s after something subtler. The details build.
David Grann
Positive The Washington Post The Wager is unadorned, almost pure, horror-filled plot, without the usual Grannian first-person moments, a tightly written, relentless, blow-by-blow account that is hard to put down, even as there are sometimes frustrating narrative gaps, a result of the limits of nonfiction grappling with 280-year-old events. For all the hours we spend with Cheap, Bulkeley and the others, they remain inaccessibly distant.
Reid Mitenbuler
Positive The Washington Post Wanderlust is at times a rollicking book about a remarkable life, but Mitenbuler runs into two problems. First, for all his adventures, Freuchen was mostly a supporting character ... Second, Mitenbuler is often so caught up in Freuchen’s frenetic movements that he seldom pauses to make enough sense of them, or the \'lost age\' of early-20th-century exploration in which Freuchen moved ... we see everything passing at high speed, but I kept wanting more stocktaking and introspection, both from Freuchen himself and from Mitenbuler. Still, Wanderlust made me envious of the time and the man.