PanThe AtlanticCoates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane ... To absorb the rest of the essay, to reread and reread it, is to sense that his rendering of his experience inside Yad Vashem is strategic as well as sincere, a means of inoculating himself against charges of insensitivity or worse as he becomes purely polemical and takes up, without any complication, the Palestinian anti-colonial narrative ... Willful blind spots ... Coates’s candor is riveting ... Purity of argument is Coates’s desire; complexity, his self-declared enemy. In this, in his refusal to wrestle with conflicting realities, the essay feels desperate. It feels devoid of the layers and depths of the most profound moral writing.
Lawrence Weschler
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewCompellingly, Weschler intertwines Sacks’s searching empathy with his sheer strangeness ... By the time Weschler writes of Sacks’s death, I found myself tearing up at the loss of this inspired creature. Yet I read And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? with an unshakable sense of missed opportunity. The feeling that the great majority of Weschler’s material has been rendered before — and with more artistic grace — by Sacks himself, in his autobiographies and accounts of treating his patients, could have been mitigated had Weschler chosen to examine topics that Sacks barely touches ... Weschler would have needed to gaze inward, possibly to expose the kind of raw longing that runs throughout much of Sacks’s writing ... Instead, Weschler keeps himself forever in check, quoting at length, deferentially, doggedly, from interview after interview, and relegating himself to an almost forgettable role ... an artful biography, as singular as Sacks’s own writing, lies beyond these reverent pages.
Caroline Elkins
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewImperial Reckoning is an important and excruciating record; it will shock even those who think they have assumed the worst about Europe\'s era of control in Africa ... [Elkins\'s] method is relentless; page after page, chapter after chapter, the horrors accumulate ... Yet for all its power, Imperial Reckoning is not as compelling as it should be. With so much evidence of atrocity, Elkins often forgoes complexity and careful analysis. Not only are the colonists barbaric in their treatment of the Kikuyu, but, as she has it, they are basically barbarous in private as well ... Unfortunately, Elkins\'s prosecutorial zeal in a sense precludes a true \'imperial reckoning.\'
