PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAt its best, this lyrical book transports the reader there ... Hamilton’s writing turns the crop...into a full-fledged character, whose blights are as chilling as a horror film ... Though beautifully written, this early part of Ia’s story makes for dense and, at times, didactic reading. To tell a refugee’s story means asking readers to follow along on ordeals so harrowing they are difficult to evoke in words, followed by stultifying years waiting in a camp ... When Ia returns to farming, the book begins to sparkle. Hamilton is a master observer, as attentive to Ia’s world as Ia is to her seedlings ... A nonfiction deep dive into rice farming may not sound like a page turner. But Ia’s story has real suspense to it, her farm constantly teetering on the edge of inviability.
Angel Au-Yeung
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is a gripping, uncomfortable read. One wants to identify the moment when Hsieh’s life turned a corner ... At its heart, this is a story about addiction ... Au-Yeung and Jeans, who covered Hsieh’s death for Forbes magazine, want to tell another story, though, about the dark side of the tech boom. There is something to this ... Why didn’t anyone force Hsieh into treatment? Au-Yeung and Jeans have performed a true service by trying to find out, interviewing many of those in his inner circle. Their writing is frustratingly clunky, as if written in haste. But the material is compelling, with the gathering tension of a slow-motion disaster. The final chapters, documenting a series of interventions that went nowhere, are riveting ... They default to a conclusion worthy of a TED Talk: that Hsieh was doomed because happiness is an intrinsically unreachable goal ... This is an unsatisfying ending, given the evidence they have laid out in the preceding pages.
Anna DeForest
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewOur narrator is not one of them, having grown up on intimate terms with addiction and poverty. This makes her less like the doctors and more like the patients they are caring for, and it is what allows her to describe the social structure of the hospital with such merciless clarity, like a spy who has sneaked into the temple ... DeForest, a practicing neurologist and palliative care physician, at times seems to waver between the goals of imaginative fiction and bearing witness. A History of Present Illness offers us the perspective of a doctor who feels everything. Her writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story. The answer, tucked in the book’s last pages, is a revelation ... But what she has written is also prosecutorial, documenting life inside a system that is closed to most of us. To anyone caring for someone near the end of life, A History of Present Illness provides a powerful argument to push back against the juggernaut of the hospital, to wrest control of the process. At times I wished she had written something as straight and clear as an indictment.
Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... vibrant ... Street children learn the rules of the undercity, because they have to. They are survival machines. In Walking the Bowl, Chris Lockhart, an American anthropologist, and Daniel Mulilo Chama, a Zambian outreach worker, allow us to slip inside this world as effortlessly as one might slip into a swimming pool ... There have been other novelistic nonfiction narratives about the daily lives of the urban poor...But daily life, meticulously recorded, rarely has the attributes of a novel — a clean arc of ascending action, a handful of vivid characters, an ending that snaps shut like a purse ... Walking the Bowl, remarkably, has all of those ... There is a built-in problem to nonfiction that reads like fiction. At times, the language of Walking the Bowl is so literary that I found myself wondering how much of it came from precise observation. It narrates the unspoken thoughts of its subjects in poetic, abstract terms ... In explanatory notes, Lockhart and Chama say that 85 percent of the incidents described in the book were \'directly observed by a team member,\' and that around 75 percent of quotations were captured with an audio recorder. The remainder was reconstructed through interviews. Still, I had an unsettling sense, at times, that I was hearing a writer’s imagination at work ... Its pages vibrate with life.
Justine Cowan
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe propulsive parts of the book come as Cowan uncovers the past that her mother was so intent on hiding ... Like an experienced litigator, Cowan shows us one exhibit after another, building a case that her mother was a victim of this harsh system. Sections of the book feel padded with term-papery digressions. I found myself longing to hear less from the card catalog, and more from Cowan’s mother ... Cowan sometimes paints her as a villainess without providing the evidence to support it ... The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames is a frustrating endeavor, in the end. It does evoke sympathy for Eileen—Eileen was her mother’s real name—just as Cowan clearly hoped it would ... But it does not heal the injury that sent Cowan on this mission, the crack in the bowl.
Perumal Murugan, Trans. by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
PositiveThe New York TimesMr. Murugan’s fictional villages are places full of quiet menace, where caste boundaries are protected with violence and social exclusion...When describing the farming communities of South India, Mr. Murugan is neither sentimental nor harsh; he describes it the way an entomologist might describe an insect....clean, clear prose.
Cam Simpson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSimpson’s obsessive reporting is the book’s great strength. There is no journalist working in South Asia or the Middle East who is not surrounded by shades of human trafficking—from apparently benign examples, like the nannies and drivers who serve their own homes, to more obviously coercive arrangements, including the children sent to work as housemaids in South Delhi bungalows. The globalization of labor is the overarching story of Asia, hauling millions of families out of desperate poverty and trapping millions of workers in something close to slavery. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s easy to stop seeing it. Simpson insists that you see it. He has given us an anatomy of globalized labor at its most shameful, complete with the internal correspondence of American military and Kellogg Brown & Root officials reporting coerced labor and human trafficking to their superiors ... It is unfortunate, given this achievement, that Simpson felt it necessary to remove himself from the heart of the story. He builds the book’s plot around Kamala Magar, the 19-year-old wife of one of the murdered workers ... But Simpson attributes thoughts to Kamala too freely, stumbling into clichés ... by scraping away at layers of corporate misdirection, by asking and asking again and not letting go, Simpson reached something naked and ugly and unimpeachably true.
