RaveThe Washington PostAndrew Lawler warns in his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, that Lost Colony fever is a kind of madness. Happily, that doesn’t stop him from plunging into the wild terrain of theories ... Lawler manages to do this in a clear-eyed way, conscious of whether he, too, is getting lost ... Lawler has a polished, pop-history writing style — informative without seeming dense, entertaining but not pandering ... One of the strengths of the first section of the book is its depiction of the civilizations that had already been clashing for generations ... Lawler also does a good job conveying the strangeness of one of the central figures of the Lost Colony mystery: the wayward governor, John White ... Lawler falls into the habit of ending chapters with suggestive cliffhangers. It works, for a while, but gets distracting ... the themes of mingled races, of cultures clashing to create something new, are surprisingly fresh and powerful.
