MixedThe Washington Post...a moving, darkly funny novel ... The portrait of the father, a cantankerous yet loving Hungarian Jewish refugee from World War II, is one of the surprise pleasures of the book. And the midsection of the novel, which describes the way the sham divorce slowly becomes a real divorce while the grandfather and Jonah bond without words, is deeply affecting ... Overall, however, Shtum is a bit of a mixed bag. The author elects to tell the story in first person present tense, a choice that adds a choppy, staccato feel to things and also underlines some of the narrative discontinuities that creep into the text along the way. The dialogue can occasionally feel a bit canned, as if lifted from a lesser sitcom, and the author overplays the scenes of his narrator as a feckless, self-loathing alcoholic ... What “Shtum” does do well, and memorably, is describe the ferocity of attachment a parent feels toward a disabled child.
Jem Lester
MixedThe Chicago TribuneShtum opens on that crossroads moment that afflicts all parents of children with severe autism: where and how to place the child in a residential facility … Ben and Jonah move out of their home and take up with Ben's elderly father. The portrait of the father, a cantankerous yet loving Hungarian Jewish refugee from World War II, is one of the surprise pleasures of the book. And the midsection of the novel, which describes the way the sham divorce slowly becomes a real divorce while the grandfather and Jonah bond without words, is deeply affecting … The dialogue can occasionally feel a bit canned, as if lifted from a lesser sitcom, and the author overplays the scenes of his narrator as a feckless, self-loathing alcoholic, endlessly recycling glimpses of him drunk, drying out and drunk again. What Shtum does do well, and memorably, is describe the ferocity of attachment a parent feels toward a disabled child.
Gary Younge
RaveBookforumRather than parse the origins of our bloody national stalemate, British journalist Gary Younge opts to narrow his focus, and to powerful effect ... Younge writes in a calm, reportorial tone strikingly at odds with the facts being described, and uses the often searing individual stories as a jumping-off point for deep dives into related phenomena ... This might sound like someone overseasoning his subject matter with sheer variety. It's not. There's a meticulousness to Younge's approach, a gracefulness to his weave of citation and digression, and a kind of open-handed honesty in his journalistic practice that keeps the reader on track. Plus, he's a gifted writer, whose prose can rise to the nearly liturgical ... Another Day in the Death of America takes its place in the slender canon of first-rate American witness literature.
Pamela Haag
RaveThe New RepublicIn her masterful The Gunning of America, Pamela Haag furnishes a salutary corrective to the perception of the gun’s inevitability in American life by showing its history as a commodity invented and then deliberately marketed and distributed like any other widget or household appliance ... In a partly speculative but gripping foray, Haag describes how [Sarah] Winchester most likely felt herself cursed, not only by the immediate deaths of her family but by all the souls dispatched courtesy of her husband’s firearms.
