PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... engaging ... wholly sympathetic ... It is a riveting story, adroitly told, full of engrossing anecdotes and rich details, derived not from conversations with Merkel herself but pieced together from published sources as well as discussions with friends and others in her orbit. That Merkel would not meet with a well-connected, sympathetic, and prestigious biographer offers an important clue to Merkel’s personality: absent vanity, uncompromising integrity, and the Lutheran virtues of humility and simplicity. It is the absence of charisma that makes her charismatic.
Bill McKibben
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...another lyrical masterpiece ... Falter reads like a book-length article in The New Yorker, which is not surprising since McKibben began his professional life there ... It is a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one, if that’s not oxymoronic, given its subject. Amply sourced and referenced for deeper study or for skeptics, it tracks the state of the natural world in exhaustive detail, and identifies the forces imperiling it ... McKibben has a knack for scare facts, all backed up by documentary evidence ... Hope being more motivating than despair, the book is a call to arms: \'Let’s be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let’s assume we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.\' It is a lovely sentiment, but also a reminder that it is not only the climate change deniers who are anti-science ... Falter provides ample evidence that we are on the cusp of an avoidable disaster.
