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Jeffrey Frank
Positive The New York Times Book Review A pretty shrewd judge...Frank does not so much puncture the Truman myth as let out just enough air to settle the man back to earth ... Frank...composes charming and often penetrating sketches of the men around Truman ... Biographers have a built-in bias toward giving their subject credit for anything within reach; Frank leans almost in the opposite direction ... Frank has very little to say about the Fair Deal, Truman’s domestic agenda ... Frank’s interests lie elsewhere; and he deserves credit for judiciousness on the tormenting decisions Truman was compelled to make ... Frank gives us this ebullient, often cantankerous man in full.
Ben Rhodes
Mixed The New York Times Book Review In the book’s most appealing passages, Rhodes sits down with people very much like himself, chastened idealists who have come to know the world as it is but refuse to conform to its demands ... But in this hybrid work, the author’s quest often feels oddly curtailed. He does not go to Russia and travels to China only briefly, with the ex-president. He tarries longer in Hungary, but not, apparently, long enough to meet anyone who shares the illiberal views of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and thus help us to understand his immense popularity. Only during Rhodes’s visit to Hong Kong does the reader get anything like the feel for place that journalism affords. Much that he tells us about these places will be familiar to any attentive newspaper reader ... Rhodes may assign the United States too much blame for disseminating the toxins that now infect the world ... Once an insider, Rhodes is now a Jeremiah. He has made good use of his freedom; he may yet make better.
Thomas Frank
Mixed The New York Times Book Review In the most compelling passages of The People, No, Frank unearths the populists from the rubble piled atop them ... Demagogy may not have been the populists’ \'true\' nature; their heroism, and tragedy, were real. But how, given this history, can one wholly dismiss the kinship between the populists and the followers of Orban and Trump? ... Frank’s purpose here is explicitly polemical: He wants to realign history in order to force us to reimagine the present ... Frank treats identity politics as yet another species of elitism. Who, then, are \'the people\'? ... the gulf between the populists and the antipopulists may not be quite so great as Thomas Frank supposes.
David D Kirkpatrick
Positive The Wall Street Journal Successful uprisings tend to have two parties—the state and the people. Egypt, to its great misfortune, had at least four: the state, the liberal opposition, the Islamists and powerful outsiders, above all the U.S. and the Persian Gulf countries. Each seems to have taken a turn slamming the doors shut just as the light of democracy began to shine through. It’s no secret that Egypt’s permanent state apparatus—its army, police, intelligence service and judiciary—never accepted the legitimacy of the popular movement and actively undermined Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood official who in 2012 won Egypt’s first free presidential election. What Mr. Kirkpatrick captures is the utter contempt among these powerful actors for the idea of popular sovereignty.
Robert D. Kaplan
Mixed The Wall Street Journal It is a sign of how very unusual a journalist Robert Kaplan is that after more than three decades covering civil wars and collapsing states and American interventions he has emerged not only as an eloquent defender of foreign-policy realism but as a grand strategist to whom the Pentagon turns for a tour d’horizon. Mr. Kaplan is a kind of expeditionary foreign-policy intellectual who does not allow his sympathies to cloud his judgment. He has apologized copiously for his support of the war in Iraq, explaining that as a journalist he got too close to the story. 'Realism' is generally understood as the doctrine stipulating that states do act, and should act, according to their 'interests' rather than their 'values.' Mr. Kaplan is certainly that kind of realist ... Our world seems so ungoverned that we are quick to acknowledge the wisdom of a Hobbesian prophet like Mr. Kaplan. But is he right? ... Directionally, Mr. Kaplan has been right. Yet he was blind to positive surprises, including progress in public health and the resilience of fragile states ... Whether or not one embraces it, tragic realism offers one lesson that Americans, and above all the idealistically inclined, need to learn, and to re-learn: humility.
Lawrence Wright
Positive The New York Times Book Review In those pieces, Wright found people to talk to — relatives of Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri — whom others had missed, and wove his research, in the New Yorker way, into a fine tapestry of personal experience and unobtrusive reflection. Whether we need to read them for a second time, however, is another matter ... That said, while the passage of time has rendered some of the pieces old hat, others are edged with retrospective significance.
J. Kael Weston
Positive The New York Times Book Review The emotional core of The Mirror Test is Weston’s profound love for the Marines, whose stoic warrior culture and bottomless commitment to one another he embraces. This reverence, however, blurs the book’s intellectual outlines, since Weston’s buddies don’t share either his horror of the wars or his commitment to putting politics and diplomacy first.