PositiveThe New York TimesThe book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America ... For many African-Americans, the book — which has spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list — gives eloquent and urgent expression to deep feelings that the criminal justice system is stacked against them.
Sam Lipsyte
RaveThe New York Review of Books...sneakily poignant ... If the action lacks much forward progress, The Ask succeeds as a series of brilliant riffs and satirical set pieces, skewering progressive preschools, reality TV, Brooklyn hipsters, conceptual art, natural childbirth, self-righteous foodies, and politically correct office culture, along with just about everything else ... America \'was a run-down and demented pimp\' ... The Ask is a brilliant illustration of both this point and the limits of this kind of point. It’s about what happens when the spinners of knowing, not-knowing riffs look around to find that everyone else has stopped listening and graduated to adulthood, whatever that is.
Kristin Dombek
PositiveThe New York Times...sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny ... Ms. Dombek, despite her efforts to keep the first-person pronoun at bay, is also offering an earnest recovery narrative of sorts.
Gloria Steinem
MixedThe New York TimesMs. Steinem’s first book in more than 20 years, is a warmly companionable look back at nearly five decades as itinerant feminist organizer and standard-bearer...But anyone expecting a conventional memoir will come away disappointed. Instead of a linear account of her peripatetic life, she offers a sometimes disjointed series of chapters that focus less on herself than on the people, both ordinary and extraordinary, she has met along the way.
