RaveThe Wall Street JournalLarry Tye gives us the fullest account yet of the crusading junior senator from Wisconsin ... the rigor of his research ensures he goes far beyond the caricature to give us a portrait of nuance and depth ... McCarthy’s personality is important because McCarthyism was not an intellectual project. The senator had no program of ideas, no set of policies he wanted to enact. It was always clear what he was against, but never what he was for, other than Joseph R. McCarthy. And as Demagogue demonstrates, it is not clear that even he knew what his ultimate goal was. It was just more.
Ben Macintyre
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)...Macintyre brings depth, perspective and storytelling panache. ... Running with the quarry is exciting stuff. While it is, of course, interesting to read about the considerable impact that Gordievsky\'s spying had on the outcome of the Cold War, and fascinating to unpack his motivations for betraying his country, all of it, as in any good spy story, is a prelude to the peripeteia, the cold-sweat moment of discovery ... The gripping account of Gordievsky\'s exposure, interrogation, and escape is Macintyre at his finest: multiple points of view, escalating tension, pungent detail.
Aleksandar Hemon
MixedThe TelegraphHemon turned the bad cards dealt him by history into a winning hand: his English is unencumbered by the weight of tired, automatic associations and has the capacity to refresh the referential relation between things and the words we use to describe them. There is crispness to Hemon’s sentences ... Perhaps it is because so many of these essays are about fragmentation – personal, familial, social, national – that Hemon has decided to leave them in discontinuous relation to each other. Perhaps it is down to his publicly acknowledged \'hatred\' for the manipulative tidying-up of \'confessional memoirs.\' Still, the way these essays are collected is frustrating. All but one of them have been published somewhere else and they have not been reworked with enough care. The tone fluctuates from essay to essay and frequently you are told something as if for the first time having read it only a few pages previously. It is precisely because Hemon is such a fine writer that these repetitions flare off the page.
