MixedThe New YorkerPerhaps because Zehme’s style cannot be imitated, or because Thomas had to work fast, or because he loved and idolized Zehme just as Zehme loved and idolized Johnny Carson, he appears to have left Zehme’s work completely untouched, and focussed solely on writing the final chapters of the story ... An exquisite corpse. The first three-quarters is chronologically scrambled and written in Zehme’s fevered post-Tom Wolfe style, filled with parentheticals, italics, digressions, and sentences that rival Victor Hugo’s in length. Then, at the beginning of the sixth chapter, the book becomes a competently told, straightforward biography of the end of Carson’s life. What emerges from all this is less a portrait of Carson than a portrait of Zehme’s obsession with Carson. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Writers’ obsessions can illuminate their subjects in ways that more dispassionate approaches can’t. But, in this instance, Zehme’s compulsive overwriting and anti-dramatic priorities settle over Carson like a fog ... One problem complicating Zehme’s bid to solve the Carson mystery is that he often dwells on odd irrelevancies ... Thomas is far more comfortable with the biographer’s traditional role.
James Shapiro
PanThe AtlanticThe search for parallels puts a presentist filter over the story of the FTP that is ultimately the book\'s undoing ... It’s particularly odd for a Shakespeare scholar of Shapiro’s immense gifts and knowledge to assert that democracy and theater go hand in hand ... In reducing the Federal Theatre Project’s story to a parable for the present day, The Playbook misses an opportunity to mine that complexity ... The primary purpose of history is not to find lessons for our time, but to understand the past. Sifting through the complex record of the Federal Theatre Project and the Dies Committee to find contemporary resonance risks covering up as much as is reveals.
Patti Hartigan
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMasterful ... With painstaking research, stylistic verve, and an eye both admiring and exacting, Ms. Hartigan has pieced together the man behind the 20th Century Cycle, bringing Wilson to furious, complicated life ... Ms. Hartigan documents with a great sense of the dramatic ... Narrated brilliantly.
Chris Ware
MixedSlateWare’s faces register for us the wounds of his characters’ lives, and in his books wounds come on almost every page. In Ware’s new graphic novel Rusty Brown, Rusty and dozens of other major and minor souls might be surprised by those wounds, but anyone familiar with Ware sure won’t ... Ware’s work after Jimmy Corrigan has shown occasional glimpses that he might stop plowing this particular furrow. But Rusty Brown demonstrates that he may not be capable of doing so ... There’s nothing wrong with writing a book about the futility of life—just ask whoever wrote Ecclesiastes—but Ware has gone to this well so many times that the thumb he’s placed on the scale is clearly visible ... There’s little compassion to be found in Rusty Brown, because compassion requires curiosity, and Ware has worked out everything too carefully for that. The schematic lifelessness that results creates a kind of numbing effect. You may not know the story in advance, but you know where it’s headed: straight to Sadtown, Population: Everyone ... This is a shame because, while Ware’s gifts as a storyteller may be suspect, he really does bring astounding formal invention to the page. Rusty Brown’s ambitions on that front are immense ... the formal gambits Ware engages in to tell this story are extraordinary ... It’s a masterpiece of artistic invention, yet it shares, like all the immaculately detailed, soulless pages in Rusty Brown, a fundamental emptiness ... Chris Ware can do seemingly anything with a comics page. Anything, that is, except portray a recognizable human being.
Joe Ollmann
MixedSlateIn the first few chapters of the book, which are drawn almost entirely from Seabrook’s writing about himself, there’s little evidence that Ollmann is interrogating Seabrook’s version of events ... The book comes to much fuller life in its second half. Seabrook’s second and third wives were both writers, and Ollmann’s research into their work and archives pays off in providing contrasting views of Seabrook’s exploits ... For the most part, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook fails to take advantage of the possibilities of comics as a form. While Ollmann’s rough-hewn drawing style is wonderfully evocative and frequently quite funny, nearly every page is divided into nine, evenly sized, cramped panels. Not only does this lend a story of adventure and world travel an unremitting claustrophobia, but with everything given equal formal weight, it’s hard to discern what has more thematic weight ... Ollmann’s cartooning is at its best when it eschews this restraint and instead engages more actively with its subject.
David France
RaveSlateIt deserves an extraordinary book. How to Survive a Plague is such a book, a sweeping social history, a bracing act of in-depth journalism, and a searingly honest memoir all at once ... While France shows a journalist’s restraint in eschewing psychological speculation about his subjects, he is also a deeply opinionated witness to their triumphs and foibles, including his own ... the chaotic, contentious, painful form of hope offered in this book is vital even as the fight it chronicles remains unfinished.
