RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewRundell shares some of her subject’s daring, which likely contributes to the freshness of her take on Donne ... She is especially good on Donne’s efforts to express ideas in novel ways ... Rundell’s own style can dazzle, though at times the wit feels a bit strained ... Rundell is keenly aware of the misogyny of a good number of these poems, and defends Donne without excusing him, pointing out that it’s a mistake to conflate the poet with the poem’s speaker ... Far more than previous (and male) biographers, Rundell is alert to Anne’s travails ... Those who write about Donne tend to gravitate either to the libertine poet and secretly Catholic Jack Donne or to the sober Protestant preacher, Dr. Donne ... One of the great achievements of this impressive biography — which rises to the challenge of introducing Donne and his world to the next generation of readers — is that it shows how these two Donnes were always one and the same.
Jo Nesbø, Trans. by Don Bartlett
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewOne of the pleasures of reading this book is watching Nesbo meet the formidable challenge of assimilating elements of the play unsuited to realistic crime fiction, especially the supernatural: the witches, prophecies, visions, and the mysterious figure of Hecate ... placing Shakespeare’s story in a late-20th-century world of drugs, gangs and corrupt civic leaders goes a long way toward solving this problem. 'Brew' — the term used for the drug to which so many are addicted — is at the heart of Nesbo’s novel and neatly straddles the murky world of Shakespeare’s witches, with their caldron, and that of modern drug labs. By making addiction so central to his plot, Nesbo also makes Macbeth’s paranoia and hallucinatory visions, so crucial to Shakespeare’s play, not just believable but meaningful in a contemporary way ... Gang warfare also informs Nesbo’s retelling and is well suited to the extreme violence of Shakespeare’s original, in which the fighting that is described and staged is ferocious ... In the end, he offers a dark but ultimately hopeful Macbeth, one suited to our own troubled times, in which 'the slowness of democracy' is no match for power-hungry strongmen who demand unstinting loyalty from ethically compromised followers, and where the brave must band together to defeat the darker forces that threaten to destroy the social fabric.
