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Recent Reviews
Adam Goodman
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...describes a nation that has for more than a century discriminated against Mexican immigrants ... Goodman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines how immigration policies and practices have been shaped as much by those who interpret, administer, execute and enforce the laws as by those who write them ... Workplace raids, neighborhood sweeps, harassment, intimidation, the knock on the door by the immigration police, detention and the ultimate deportation of unwanted immigrants were not born with the current administration. They have been standard practice for more than a century.
Jia Lynn Yang
Positive The New York Times Book Review Because hers is a quasi-morality tale of the victory of tolerant reformers over bigoted obstructionists, Yang detours around the central irony in her historical account: that two of the most significant provisions of the 1965 act, the opening of doors to Asian immigrants (including her father) and the closing of them, through the imposition of quotas, to Latin Americans, principally Mexicans, were not part of the reformers’ agenda during the 40-year \'epic struggle\' that is the subject of her book ... While \'we tend to describe immigrants’ stories as feats of will and strokes of destiny,\' Yang reminds us, \'it is not destiny that brings a family here but politics.\' This is a message worth noting as we approach November.
Robert Dallek
Mixed The New York Times Book Review There are many strengths to Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life. Dallek fully incorporates into his narrative Roosevelt’s complicated, conflicted relationship with the several women in his life and is especially good on the role Eleanor played, as goad and political adviser. He also makes it clear, in a way other biographers do not, that almost from the moment he entered office, Roosevelt set out to educate the nation to the fact that the United States was threatened not only by economic depression at home, but also by fascist aggressions abroad … There is, regrettably, little to distinguish it from the many excellent biographies that came before it and on which it draws. The prose is clean, but flat, with little sparkle or literary grace. There are no new analytic thrusts or parries, no new sources or imaginative reinterpretations of old ones.
Larry Tye
Positive The New York Times Book Review Larry Tye has done his homework...The story he tells in Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon is familiar, but the vast array of materials he has consulted and the interviews he has conducted are enough to give it a new vitality ... We are in Larry Tye’s debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who spoke these words and, for a brief moment, almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans.
Jane Mayer
Rave The New York Times “Dark Money is a persuasive, timely and necessary story of the Koch brothers’ empire. It may read overly long and include some familiar material, but only the most thoroughly documented, compendious account could do justice to the Kochs’ bizarre and Byzantine family history and the scale and scope of their influence.