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Tom Philpott
Positive The New York Times Book Review Shutting your eyes may be presidential policy, but the journalist and blogger Tom Philpott won’t let us get away with it. He wants to focus our attention squarely on the environmental consequences of the global and, especially, the American way of raising food. Nothing, his new Perilous Bounty reminds us, is going in the right direction ... . I didn’t once see the word \'regenerative\' in Perilous Bounty, though Philpott is very much concerned with soil and water health. He must dislike the term — and given the plain-spoken crankiness that has always been an endearing feature of his writing, he maintains a surprisingly tactful silence on it. The whole book, in fact, skirts the tendentiousness that has become a hallmark of writing that sounds environmental alarms ... Perhaps that’s because the author simply expects the reader to be as appalled as he is by the plain facts, which he lays out with new clarity ... As most of us, and surely the author, dream of rebuilding an agriculture system that at last puts racial equity at its center, we can’t lose sight of the land, water and air that need the loudest and longest advocacy.
Bee Wilson
Positive The New York Times Book Review The world tour Wilson undertakes can be full of the joy of learning about new foods and how to savor and cook them. She does get around to describing some of that, but making us want to come along on that trip is a trick that Wilson, who too often sounds like a born scold, has trouble pulling off. She is shocked, shocked at the terrible state we have come to ... readers should persist. Wilson is a reformer at heart, and she earnestly wants to lead us to the constructive optimism she offers at the end of her book ... both useful and informative, thoroughly and enterprisingly reported. When she isn’t hectoring, Wilson presents a remarkable array of data, often in unusual and striking charts, and delivers numerous surprises.
Cullen Murphy
Positive The Atlantic As Murphy recounts in his new Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe, comic strips, so much a part of the fabric of the American scene in the last century, were in Fairfield County a family enterprise ...a loving, precise, and delightful portrait of a world Murphy was 'powerfully drawn to' as a child, though he knew 'even then that its days were numbered and that before long it would disappear.'
John McPhee
Positive The New York Times Book Review Writers looking for the secrets of his stripped-bark style and painstaking structure will have to be patient with what is a discursive, though often delightful, short book. McPhee’s publisher is presenting it as a 'master class,' but it’s really a memoir of writing during a time of editorial cosseting that now seems as remote as the court of the Romanovs. Readerly patience will be rewarded by plentiful examples of the author’s sinewy prose and, toward the end, by advice and tips that will help writers looking to become better practitioners of the craft and to stay afloat in what has become a self-service economy ... Perhaps the most generous passages in this generous book are in these final chapters: letters to the student of a fellow writing teacher, Anne Fadiman (whose yearly seminar at Yale was endowed by a former student in honor of Zinsser), and to Martha and Jenny, two of his four daughters, now both professional writers.