MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The range of reference is vast and at times dizzying ... Pettegree is a vigorous guide, but the breadth and rapidity of the coverage result in some lack of nuance.
Walter Isaacson
PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Isaacson has a taste for crisp chapters that are often four or five pages long, and interleaves episodes from Musk’s career with snapshots of his most intimate relationships ... Yet he also comes across as unexpectedly realistic about the possibility of defeat — and funny.
Yepoka Yeebo
RaveTimes Literary Supplement\"Blay-Miezah was slick enough to capture the attention of savvy folk, rather than just the conventionally gullible. As Yepoka Yeebo, a British-Ghanaian journalist, makes clear in her richly entertaining account of his rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic – the latter seduced by the thought of using the missing billions to boost Ghana’s infrastructure ... Spanning the period from Nkrumah’s student days in the 1930s to the scramble for Blay-Miezah’s assets after his death in 1992, Yeebo’s story is one of a country \'ripped apart by colonialism, then … set upon by vultures.\' She has a sharp eye for droll detail and is especially successful in evoking the two decades that followed independence.\
Peter Moore
PositiveThe Times (UK)Absorbing ... Moore has a keen eye for the sort of eloquent detail that enlivens biography ... Moore makes a plausible case for [Catherine Macaulay] as scholar and agitator, but treats her pretty briskly.
Florence Hazrat
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Brisk, enjoyably mischievous ... Hazrat also notices positive functions that tend to be ignored ... Along the way she shares some bright nuggets of information.
Robert Harris
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Densely populated ... Harris has done his research ... But the evocation of period detail doesn’t always convince ... None of this interferes with the lucidity of the storytelling or its suspensefulness, and each of the main characters has a satisfying degree of moral ambiguity. There’s a topical message, too, about the lasting wounds of ideological division.
Julian Barnes
MixedThe Spectator (UK)Poised, droll, epigrammatic ... We may not be wholly convinced of the vaunted originality of [EF\'s] ideas and elegance of her teaching ... For the first 70 pages Elizabeth Finch appears to be a twinkly character study, a portrait of the sort of noble teacher who inspires poetic and political awakenings. Like most of Barnes’s recent work, it exhibits the wryness of the late middle-aged. The prose has his customary wit and precision. But then it becomes something else ... It’s brave of Barnes to make the book’s middle third a dry student dissertation (with chatty asides) on the ups and downs of Julian’s reputation ... Barnes has an escapologist’s nimbleness, and Elizabeth Finch only toys with the possibility of being an anti-Brexit screed or an unblushing selfie. It’s more concerned with disappointment, hidden desires, mis-understandings and the irrecoverability of the past. Each is familiar territory for Barnes, yet here their treatment feels slight. At one point Neil accuses himself of ‘novelettish banality’, and the phrase lingers in the mind uncomfortably.
Hana Videen
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalI doubt that I’m alone in frowning at the proliferation of nonfiction that began life as burblings on social media, and there’s an undelightful subgenre of Twitterature consisting of volumes that merely pile up linguistic trivia. But Ms. Videen is both a passionate medievalist and a relaxed, lucid writer; the pleasure she takes in her subject is infectious ... Instead of offering a comprehensive guide to Old English, The Wordhord leads the reader on a tour of those people’s everyday concerns: food, work, recreation, travel ... Ms. Videen tends to exhibit words individually—as tweetable nuggets—rather than situating them in the texts where they occur. Yet there are enough literary snippets here to suggest why Old English has enchanted so many authors ... Even when rendered in 21st-century English, many kennings remain wonderfully vivid. The body is a bone-locker, flesh-hoard or life-house; the sun is a heaven-candle; the sea can be the wave-path, sail-road or whale-way. A spider is a weaver-walker. A battle is a storm of swords. A visit to a grave is a dust-viewing. These condensed metaphors activate the imagination: First they make the ordinary look strange, and then, as their strangeness dissolves, our powers of perception feel refreshed—or, as an inhabitant of early medieval Britain might have put it, \'ge-hyrted.\'
A. N. Wilson
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... is not intended as a comprehensive biography, and it contains little fresh research. Instead it’s a sprightly work of reinterpretation. Besides being a prolific popular historian who has produced lives of Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, C.S. Lewis and Jesus, Mr. Wilson is a novelist, and he brings to the task of biography a shrewd sense of how creative writers operate, along with a large stock of intuitions about human nature. The results are frequently perceptive, though colored by a desire to provoke ... The opportunity is available to him because there is much about Dickens’s life that we simply don’t know. Each chapter sustains the promise of the book’s title by unpacking an at least partly obscure aspect of it, in a style that’s a mix of brisk exposition and expansive psychological inquiry ... Mr. Wilson, borrowing a term made popular by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, diagnoses a \'divided self,\' though he analyses his subject’s contradictions with more subtlety than this well-worn phrase suggests ... Unlike some of Dickens’s best-known biographers, Mr. Wilson is keenly attentive to the books themselves and to parsing their effects. He is an observant reader and, as he makes clear, an avid re-reader, forever developing new insights into familiar stories ... Mr. Wilson is often happy to make his case with peppery audacity ... while Mr. Wilson’s speculations are sometimes clumsy, most are rooted, as becomes increasingly clear, in the emotional truth of his response to the novels.
James Geary
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAlthough Mr. Geary keeps returning to the subject of puns and their capacity to fold \'a double knowledge into words,\' he ranges wide ... Crucially, instead of analyzing wit to death, Mr. Geary chooses to embody it. Each of his chapters is written in a particular form that wit frequently takes. One chapter is a stand-up routine ... Another is an illustrated lecture on the trompe l’oeil ... Mr. Geary writes not just playfully but also with panache ... Mr. Geary’s chief success is in conveying the power of wit to refresh the mind.
Lynne Murphy
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe Prodigal Tongue is acute about the more subtle differences between America and Britain, not least in perspectives on class and race ... Yet the book’s chief pleasure is a simple one: Instead of sending the language to school, it savors a great many words and phrases that are staples on one side of the pond and unfamiliar on the other. Ms. Murphy has an amusing facility for zapping tired language myths, and she peppers her lively chapters with snippets from latter-day Bernard Shaws ... the most striking feature of her writing is a fascination with the quirks of usage. She succeeds in her ambition to increase \'our enjoyment of our common language and our pride in it,\' and her essential argument is that the plurality of English, a result of the riotous drama of history, is something to extol: \'What if instead of tutting, we marveled?\'
Edward St. Aubyn
PositiveThe Financial TimesLost for Words is much lighter than the Melrose novels – a brisk, ultimately farcical satire that is ideal for the sun lounger and unlikely to earn the author further heavyweight comparisons. Whereas previously St Aubyn’s subject has been the tortured intricacy of family life, he now turns to the snaky politics of the literary world. Everything he writes is a comedy of manners, and even here one can occasionally see the legacy of Henry James and Jane Austen … We are left in little doubt that St. Aubyn has contempt for the political agendas and horse-trading that influence the process of awarding literary prizes. More interesting than this is his concern with the hyperactive self-consciousness that informs the very act of creating fiction – and especially the kind of fiction that’s intended to be prize-worthy.
Daniel Alarcón
PositiveThe Financial TimesIn each of the 10 stories here, dark forces operate with spirit-sapping persistence: officials are corrupt, politicians are manipulative and crowds thrive on lurid spectacle ...
Alarcón is hardly the first writer to examine the crisis of masculinity, but he’s unusually alive to the ways that it is bound up with uncertainty about political and national identity. His recurrent concern with men drowning in ennui means that these stories lack tonal variety ... Yet at root this experiment in alternative reality is still about loss and malaise, and even when flirting with surrealism Alarcón maintains a deadpan style. It’s the detachment of a writer whose work suggests that there is no clear-cut frontier between reportage and fiction.
Karen Joy Fowler
MixedThe Financial TimesIn flashbacks, [Rosemary] pictures the extraordinary lifestyle her parents constructed. Her tone calls to mind a patient talking frankly to her therapist, presenting episodes from her childhood with a bracing vividness that is touched by uncertainty … The strength of Fowler’s writing is its piercing evocation of the dynamics of family. Rosemary’s relatives may be eccentric, but their patterns of guilt, affection and evasiveness are familiar. Where the novel proves less successful is in seeking – indeed, straining – to make bigger points about the inherent brutality and insouciance of humankind, the ‘endless, fathomless misery’ we each day choose to ignore.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
PositiveThe Financial TimesAlthough Autumn consists of short essays rather than lengthy musings, it shares the digressive and pedantic qualities of My Struggle. Ostensibly writing for his unborn daughter, Knausgaard ponders abstract matters such as forgiveness and silence, but mostly discusses more humdrum items... Sometimes he’s a latter-day Roland Barthes, examining familiar objects and activities in a style that’s eloquent but also a bit precious ... The best sections are suffused with parental tenderness ... Whereas the magic of My Struggle lies in its author’s ability to do justice to exactly what’s on his mind, in Autumn he is less interested in the topography of his inner life, preferring to look outwards. As the title suggests, the mood tends to be elegiac.
Howard Jacobson
MixedThe Financial TimesJulian Treslove, a middle-aged BBC producer of little note, is in fact a typical Jacobson creation, obsessed with Jewishness. He loves what he sees as the Jewish cult of rivalry and expertise in introspection. His friends are Jewish; he is intrigued by them as individuals and as cultural specimens. Their angst seems wonderful in its intensity … Why exactly does Treslove want to be Jewish? It’s hard not to sense that the chief reason is that it allows Jacobson to have great fun with Treslove’s non-Jewishness – and to draw a succession of enjoyable contrasts between Jewish and Gentile behaviours … Yet while The Finkler Question is both an entertaining novel and a humane one, it isn’t Howard Jacobson at his best. The characters are not as satisfyingly developed as in 2006’s superb Kalooki Nights and his writing here feels less precise than is his wont, less fresh and less frighteningly mordant.
T.C. Boyle
MixedThe Financial TimesBoyle is a smart observer of human flaws, and there are moments when The Terranauts is a striking portrait of vanity and weakness. Yet while he’s a fluent, often exuberant writer, he’s certainly not an economical one ... Despite all Boyle’s efforts to make the novel seem a spiritually charged experience and a religious allegory, it feels like an upmarket soap opera. There’s too relentless a concern with which of the terranauts will pair off — and too much sprawling evocation of how and where they might do so.
Gaston Dorren
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Dorren doesn’t seek to develop a bold argument. Instead this is one of those books—now abundant—that bulge with linguistic trivia. Fortunately, he has an eye for genuinely surprising detail. He is also, for the most part, a witty commentator, though occasionally his efforts to be amusing fall flat...
