PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksJohn Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a Thoreau for our own fraught moment, rooted in what they convincingly describe as the central place of work in Thoreau’s philosophy and life ... The easy inference from Thoreau’s example is a moral that’s hardly unique to him: do what you love. Kaag and van Belle’s book is least original and interesting when it harnesses Thoreau in service of this message—not because it’s untrue or un-Thoreauvian, but because it too easily lapses into self-help clichés.
Stephen Budiansky
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksWhat...is the value of yet another Holmes biography at a time when his jurisprudence seems so distant from ours? It is at once the strength and the flaw of Budiansky’s biography that it largely elides the question. As one of the few nonlawyers to write a Holmes biography, Budiansky is more interested in Holmes the man than Holmes the jurist ... Budiansky offers a visceral and page-turning account of Holmes at war ... Holmes is as distant from contemporary law in style as he is in substance. And if Budiansky is somewhat short on the latter point, he atones for it by amply showing that for Holmes as for all great writers, style and substance were in the end one and the same.
