PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewDuring those first weeks in Paris, [Cummings] fell in love with a prostitute, Marie Louise Lallemand. On the intensity of his feelings and his later self-reproach for \'cruel”\'treatment of her (the details of which remain obscure), Rosenblitt writes some of her most original and interesting pages ... Rosenblitt doesn’t attempt a general assesment of his autobiographical war novel, The Enormous Room; an odd omission, since that book is the main reason people associate him with the war at all. From evidence in the notebooks, however, she does confirm many details of Cummings’s descriptions of the men who filed into and out of the Enormous Room.
Matt Taibbi
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksTaibbi’s angriest chapter is his best. He calls it \'Why Russiagate Is This Generation’s WMD.\' He means that the exorbitant claims regarding Trump’s status as a \'Russian agent\'...have proved to be a symptom of group thinking as misleading as the disinformation sown by Cheney, Bush, and Tony Blair to support the bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003 ... Taibbi gets into much sharper focus...the prototype for Trump’s brags and threats in the occupational skills he learned from World Wrestling Entertainment ... Rather disarmingly, Taibbi confesses that he is implicated in the bad habits he deplores in Trump and his journalistic haters ... one comes to rely on Taibbi to point out the way, for example, the studio sets of TV news programs like Meet the Press now resemble the pre-game shows for NFL football ... The media today occupy the same world as politicians, and that is a problem. At any given moment, it may be a puzzle to decide who is calling the tune.
James Poniewozik
MixedThe New York Review of BooksAudience of One slugs this story pretty hard ... The functional clichés are symptoms of a small but persistent vice of style. When Poniewozik wants to impress the reader more than the evidence warrants, he talks fancy ... The deep-contextual explanations of Trump have an air of slightly forced wonder ... The misreadings start to add up when Poniewozik says of the rags-to-riches yokels in The Beverly Hillbillies that...the Clampett family were the prototype of Trump voters: they bore in silent outrage the scars of \'the shared grievance that they were laughed at, scorned as ‘deplorables.’\' Well, the show was silly, but its governing conceit was the perfect good nature of the Clampetts ... The point about the hillbillies was not their bitterness but their aplomb. Poniewozik’s chapters on early television grow more credible as they approach his own childhood years as a TV watcher ... Yet the story finally wears thin because Poniewozik can’t refrain from trying to match up his skills as a television critic against the essentially political subject matter: he can hardly name a TV series without discerning the deep structure of the souls of white folk ... if one has in mind the academic virtues of scope and proportion, his is the more coherent book [compared with Matt Taibbi\'s Hate Inc.]. It is weakened by a certain complacency—a refusal to see that the strange and new is actually strange and new—which can muffle perception.
Jane Mayer
PositiveThe NationThe Koch family portrait aside, Dark Money piles up facts and anecdotes to support its central thesis: the evasion by the very rich of any obligation to rise above self-interest and serve the public interest. But selfishness usually wants an alibi, and Mayer might have paused somewhere to try and explain the attraction of the free-market ideology...The billionaires do all the mischief they can, and Jane Mayer, in this brave and resourceful book, has numbered their abuses with admirable pertinacity, but they are only one of the forces 'behind the rise of the radical right.'
