PositiveThe New York Review of Books... a record that will certainly leave [Boochani\'s] jailers gnashing their teeth ... vividly described ... About the journalism that got him into trouble with the authorities and his subsequent flight from Iran he has little to say ... provides a wholly engrossing account of the first four years that Boochani spent on Manus, up to the time when the prison camp was closed and the prisoners resettled elsewhere on the island. Just as absorbing is his analysis of the system that reigns in the camp, a system imposed by the Australian authorities but autonomous in the sense that it holds the jailers as well as the prisoners in its grip ... Boochani’s wish to protect his fellow detainees from reprisal is understandable, but it is nonetheless a pity that we are given no reliable facts about them ... As autobiography, No Friend is not the summing up of a life but a work in progress, the absorbing record of a life-transforming episode whose effects on his inner self the writer is still trying to plumb.
Philip Roth
MixedThe New York Review of BooksWhat the plot against America does to young Philip between the ages of seven and nine is terrible. It forces upon him—though less, it must be noted, at first hand than through the medium of newsreels and radio programs and from eavesdropping on his parents’ worried conversations—a vision of a world based on hatred and suspicion, a world of them and us. It turns him from a Jewish American into an American Jew, or in the eyes of his enemies just a Jew in America … The Plot Against America is not a major work. What it offers in place of tragedy is pathos of a heart-wrenching kind saved from sentimentality by a sharp humor, a risky, knife-edge performance that Roth brings off without a slip. The subject of the keenest pathos is not young Philip—though, clutching his stamp album, heading off into the night, determined to be just a boy again, Philip is pathetic enough—but Philip’s neighbor and shadow self, Seldon Wishnow.
