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Recent Reviews
David Michaelis
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... the first major single-volume biography in more than half a century, and a terrific resource for people who aren’t ready to tackle Blanche Wiesen Cook’s heroic three-volume work. At more than 700 pages it’s hardly a quick read, but it’s a great resource for people who don’t know a whole lot about her ... Eleanor’s own romantic life gets thorough treatment, given that much or all of it seemed to involve crushes rather than consummation.
Leandra Ruth Zarnow
Positive The New York Times Book Review Reading about how the mostly female volunteers steamrollered the traditional New York Democratic machine, feel free to think of [Absug] as a middle-aged, Jewish, Vietnam-era version of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. That would please Zarnow, who sees a whole lot of similarities between our era and the 1970s, when Democratic progressives were going head-to-head against establishment moderates for control of the party’s agenda ... gives rather short shrift to Abzug’s many failings as a boss.
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The Deep End of the Ocean, Jacquelyn Mitchard\'s wrenching first novel, flies in the face of everything movies and your better class of talk shows say about bad things that happen to good people ... Although The Deep End of the Ocean arrives with all the trail marks of a soon-to-be-major motion picture (Michelle Pfeiffer\'s production company is in on the movie deal), the book is not so much a thriller as a gut wrencher ... The first half...is wonderfully written. The scenes in the hotel lobby throb with a panic that actually starts with the reader, who already knows what\'s going to happen, and then spreads to the happily oblivious Beth, her friends, and finally the reluctant-to-accept-trouble hotel staff ... The resolution of the kidnapping comes halfway through the book, and its improbability reflects badly on everything that went before. Beth, whose insistence on carrying her stony misery had seemed almost heroic, begins to look more and more like a pain in the neck. Her long-suffering husband is a blur. The fact that Detective Bliss seems to have been transplanted from some other book becomes more noticeable. Ben, whose portrait as a perfect 3-year-old seemed like a mother\'s natural editing of the memories of a lost child, turns out to be improbably saintly at 12, too. Only Vincent, Ben\'s older brother, keeps the story moving ... Fortunately, Vincent\'s aching, sassy perspective takes over more and more of the book as it stumbles to an upbeat conclusion.
Patricia Miller
Positive The New York Times Book Review What better time for a story about a prominent man taken totally aback when he discovers that the rules about what he can get away with have changed ... Quotes...which Miller dug up during her extensive research, make for captivating drama ... [this] saga vanished from the national memory. Congratulations to Patricia Miller for bringing it back.