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Michael Benson
Positive Barnes & Noble \"Since its release fifty years ago—the film has felt like an entity unto itself, alive with all of the possibilities of the cinema, which makes it perfect for the biographical treatment that Michael Benson lavishes upon it in Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. Benson, whose love for the film feels like a kind of duty to get his expose of its creation right, possesses a stick-to-itiveness on the research front that offers up the bulk of this book’s meat ... What is particularly fascinating about Benson’s accounts are how mundanity often leads to profundity ... Benson’s deeply-researched style has its flaws – he leans on the word \'however\' so much that one starts counting the occurrences per paragraph. But a pleasing effect of Benson’s deep dives into the background material is how it encourages readers to revisit Clarke’s work.\
Laura Dassow Walls
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Pleasing to me was to see Cape Cod — Thoreau’s tome about that beguiling, bewitching peninsula, a briny world unto itself — get the plaudits it deserves. Walls rightly calls it 'Walden’s dark twin' ... This is Thoreau’s best writing, his most sonorously poetic, a mellifluous foghorn sounding for you, and your attention, in the deepest lapis lazuli of the night. As Walls writes, Thoreau relished visceral joy — the dance of nature, the reverberation of unadulterated, uncapped feeling — 'making this book of darkness blaze with life.' The same phrase could double as an encapsulation for his life, and now this biography, a rectangle of radiance in your hands, with its own glow.
Marc Eliot
Positive The Barnes & Noble Review ...a voluminous, and possibly definitive, study one of the big screen’s paragons of brawn and masculinity ... He often comes off as a pawn for cagey directors but a thinking pawn all the same, with a sensitive B.S. detector making up the deficiencies of top-shelf mental acumen ... Eliot’s portrait of Heston’s life does take some turns off the set, and we catch glimpses of a fascinating political figure, so far as actors go, one considerably more protean than we now think ... But Eliot’s clear preference is the world of film, putting us right there with Heston as he mulls scripts, trains, launches himself bodily and mentally — both so far as each aspect of him went — into epics, biopics, big pictures, small pictures, more or less equally. Heston is at its best here.
Chuck Klosterman
Pan The San Francisco Chronicle He’s not insincere when he advances a number of theories that make good bar fodder — like that rock ’n’ roll will probably cease to exist someday save as some footnote to the Beatles — but as a reader you might find yourself asking your own question: Why should we care? ... It’s a barroom form of Socratic wisdom poured out in a book ... There is nothing authoritative here, and, worse, nothing that is questioningly authoritative. You can ask a good question, one that maybe you can’t answer, and that is a kind of fierce statement because it makes points and splinter-points in the very asking. Klosterman can’t do that. Or he doesn’t, anyway.
Carlo Rovelli
Pan The San Francisco Chronicle There is the nagging sense that a book like this is meant to hook people normally terrified by 'weighty' scientific thought — a kind of 'Physics for Dummies,' which you can read in 45 minutes — and to get parents to plunk down the cash so that precocious Susie, as she heads into next year’s AP classes, can be one further up still. Feels like a quick-draw marketing move to me, and reads like one as well, in that you can read this book once, and there’s not much more to get from it.
Philip Norman
Positive The Washington Post It wraps up ­Beatles matters about halfway through and isn’t very polarizing, but then again, McCartney himself rarely has been. Norman is thorough, though, and his book gives us a fuller McCartney than you’ll find anywhere else, in part because of McCartney’s studious management of his brand over the years.
David Duchovny
Pan The San Francisco Chronicle Bucky F*ing Dent” could swap in tiddlywinks and be the same book. It feels as if some research has been done by an assistant, and an overestimation of a sports cliche has resulted in a novel that is clearly forced ... I have no idea why this book has baseball in it, and if it could have anything else and still be the same book, that’s a failure. In writing, everything must be integral, and if it’s not, the side has, to large degree, been let down ... Imagistic detail and rhythmic cadence are [Duchovny's] skills. He excels at the vignette, the group of men riffing on jokes with each other, their dialogue overlapping. But you never stop thinking that this book was supposed to be something else, that it was shoe-horned into a novel.