‹ Reviewer Book Marks

Christopher Hitchens

Positive The New York Times Book Review ...we learn little about the friendships of Hitchens’s that soured as he began his political metamorphoses, and we hear practically nothing about his fondness for drink, though he does treat us to a brief audit of his intake ... None of this means that Hitch-22 isn’t marvelous in its own way. But it’s probably a misnomer to call it a memoir, and easier to enjoy if one thinks of it as a collection of essays instead ... Some will find his version of events sympathetic; others will find it a cliché, the inevitable rightward drift of an old Trotskyist; and still others will violently quarrel with his tangents and disquisitions, as Hitchens so often makes one do ... Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it’s touching, in Hitch-22 to see how often he’ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve.

Preet Bharara

Mixed The New York Times Book Review \"But Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law isn’t a memoir, exactly; had it been an uncomplicated reminiscence, I would have enjoyed it much more ... [The book\'s goal] is all fine in theory — but only sometimes works in practice. Bharara seems to be addressing would-be prosecutors on some pages... and a wider audience on others... and he doesn’t seem to settle into a common register until the second half of the book ... Is all of this book filled with Polonius gunk? No. Most chapters delight or provoke in some way, if you mentally redact the fortune-cookie sentences (of which there are mercifully fewer in the second half) ... [The book] is filled with sobering stories about error and — in the more beautiful, memorable cases — ingenuity, determination, redemption.\

Jeff Goodell

Rave The New York Times Once you’ve read an excellent book about climate change, which Jeff Goodell’s The Water Will Come most certainly is, you can never unremember the facts ... After this year’s calamitous flooding in Houston and the Caribbean, The Water Will Come is depressingly well-timed, though I’m guessing all good books about this subject will be from now on.

Bill McKibben

Positive The New York Times Radio Free Vermont is a charming bit of artisanal resistance lit. It’s a bit rough, with the occasional nailhead poking up too high. (Perry’s upspeak? It gets to be, um, a bit much?) But what’s surprising is how well-crafted the book is over all; how unhokey its folksiness feels, and how true its observations ring ... Radio Free Vermont is more than 'A Fable of Resistance,' as its subtitle says. It’s a love letter to the modest, treed-in landscape of Vermont, which Barclay wouldn’t trade for all the grandeur of Montana. It’s a dirge for the intense cold, which Barclay sorely misses. It is an elegy for a slower, saner Vermont and dependable Yankee virtues, like neighborliness and self-reliance and financial prudence.

Joe Biden

Positive The New York Times What’s most remarkable about Biden’s Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose is that he’s decided to give us full visibility into the agony and strangeness of that period, showing just what it was like to care for his son — and then mourn him — while simultaneously fulfilling his duties as vice president. The book is a backstage drama, honest, raw and rich in detail. People who have lost someone will genuinely take comfort from what he has to say. But this memoir is also a political book, one in which Biden touts his accomplishments and makes frequent forays into the wetlands of foreign and domestic policy. His position-paper entr’actes can be awkward and artless, much like the author himself. But after a time, you come to understand why he’s mixing in pages of his curriculum vitae with pages about grief: To Biden, the two are intertwined. It’s almost as if he suffers from a kind of political synesthesia ... It’s to Biden’s credit that you don’t really question these anecdotes. He may be a bit excitable, a bit of a windbag. But anyone who’s ever covered Congress (I did, for a while) can discern on the page what was discernible in real life: the bartender aspect of Biden’s character, the natural convener who reads customers well enough to put them at ease. He’s always understood that the political is personal.

Tina Brown

Mixed The New York Times I’m not sure who greenlighted these opening pages, which blunder so frequently into self-parody. At times, Brown seems capable of writing in only two registers: Brag and humblebrag ... Watching her settle into the confident, industry-conquering editor she’d become is a revelation. So is the glimpse she offers into her own habits and appetites. Brown is a woman of wondrous drive and ambition, arcing through the world as if fired from a cannon. One might think that people of such vectored determination don’t stop much to think about it. But Brown’s diaries reveal surprising ambivalence ... For legacy-media freaks, The Vanity Fair Diaries is a bound volume of crack...Yet after reading these diaries, I still wonder how much of an audience exists for them. Pages upon pages are filled with stories about dinners with doyennes who, even in their day, were only a big deal in one or two ZIP codes. Many of its barons are long forgotten, dead or disgraced. The dish about Condé Nast’s kings and queens regnant will be tasty to those who know them, but will anyone beyond their own (dwindling) clan even care? ... To me, Brown’s truest and most heartfelt confessions are about her maternal guilt and ambivalence.

Lindsey Fitzharris

Positive The New York Times Lindsey Fitzharris’s slim, atmospheric The Butchering Art has its share of resplendent gore. The book is an imperfect first effort, stronger at the beginning than at the end, and a bit workaday when it isn’t freaky — it floats less on narrative momentum than on an armada of curious details. But the story it tells is one of abiding fascination, in part because it involves a paradigm shift so basic, so seemingly obvious, that one can scarcely believe the paradigm needed shifting in the first place.

Walter Isaacson

Positive The New York Times There is a significant difference, though, between Leonardo da Vinci and Isaacson’s previous biographies. His other geniuses left behind bountiful source material about the lives they led. Leonardo did not ...what Leonardo’s notebooks lack — which Isaacson readily concedes — are 'intimate personal revelations' ... Isaacson does not seem to be that kind of writer. Absent the documentary material he’s accustomed to, he overcompensates with copious analyses of Leonardo’s works ... Isaacson is stronger when he’s on familiar turf, showing us Leonardo the scientist and innovator, the engineer and secret doctor ... The pleasure of an Isaacson biography is that it doesn’t traffic in such cynical stuff; the author tells stories of people who, by definition, are inimitable ... What endures after reading Leonardo da Vinci is just how indifferent to glory the man was.

Henry Marsh

Positive The New York Times Like “Do No Harm, Admissions is wandering and ruminative, an overland trek through the doctor’s anxieties and private shames. Once again, he recounts his miscalculations and surgical catastrophes, citing the French doctor René Leriche’s observation that all surgeons carry cemeteries within themselves of the patients whose lives they’ve lost ... But in this book, Marsh has retired, which means he’s taking a thorough inventory of his life. His reflections and recollections make Admissions an even more introspective memoir than his first, if such a thing is possible ... The most startling aspect of Admissions, however, has nothing to do with medicine. It’s how Marsh portrays himself. As a young man, he writes, he was close to suicidal and spent time in a psychiatric hospital...He opens Admissions by telling us he’s acquired a suicide kit, in case his death is painful and slow, and he closes with a civilized discussion of euthanasia. But he confesses he doesn’t know if he’d ever have the courage to hasten his own death. Which may be his most profound admission of all.

John Green

Rave The New York Times Turtles All the Way Down, is somehow far darker, not so much because of the subject matter — though that’s dark too — but because of how he chooses to write about it. This novel is by far his most difficult to read. It’s also his most astonishing ... A sweet, conventional love story begins. But it hits a bittersweet, unconventional dead end. Aza can’t kiss Davis without panicking...But the real question is: How does such a story end for Aza? If an author has integrity, it should end plausibly. Green has integrity...I still wasn’t prepared for the ending of this novel. It’s so surprising and moving and true that I became completely unstrung, incapable of reading it to my husband without breaking down. One needn’t be suffering like Aza to identify with it. One need only be human. Everyone, at some point, knows what it’s like when the mind develops a mind of its own.

Ron Chernow

Rave The New York Times Chernow is clearly out to find undiscovered nobility in his story, and he succeeds; he also finds uncannily prescient tragedy. There are ways in which Grant’s times eerily resemble our own ... Grant is vast and panoramic in ways that history buffs will love. Books of its caliber by writers of Chernow’s stature are rare, and this one qualifies as a major event. Chernow grapples with an enormous amount of material, while mostly sustaining a tight focus. He manages to put on Grant goggles and deal primarily with this one soldier’s role in the military, this one leader’s role in the Civil War. And then the role of one president — branded a political amateur — in leading a country still coming apart at the seams ... The book includes an awful lot of instances when Grant slipped up in his abstinence, but Chernow is deeply in his subject’s camp, always ready to play apologist about the drinking and other troubling behaviors ... Of course, Grant’s efforts to protect former slaves didn’t keep them from suffering after the war, in the backlash against Reconstruction. And Grant had trouble protecting himself as well, facing severe financial troubles after his presidency. Chernow’s indispensable book, which attempts to see Grant’s life as a triumph, is also steeped in tragedy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Positive The New York Times \"One of the book’s most persistent, recurrent themes, a shuttle that flies through the loom, is that black progress is always met with a violent backlash — the modern apotheosis of which was the election of Donald J. Trump. Most of these pieces force a reckoning with ideas that people, mainly whites, avoid contemplating or reject or insist (sometimes rightly) are more complicated: That American democracy was predicated on an enslaved class of Africans; that most white Americans still can’t tolerate the idea of equality; that acknowledging the many legacies of slavery is too much to ask of most whites, because it would disrupt our conception of our country and ourselves ... As indispensable as his voice is, he might well have been crowned \'America’s best writer on race,\' as one newspaper put it, prematurely. Simply reading and name-checking him came to feel sufficient for some white readers, preventing them from consuming other African-American voices with different points of view and different readings of history. But taking in Coates’s essays from start to finish is still a bracing thing, like drinking a triple scotch, neat ... It is to Coates’s credit that by the time you’re done reading We Were Eight Years in Power, you also see what he does — namely, that far too many whites are overlooking what is so plainly staring them in the face, and that America couldn’t have a black president without boomeranging back to its ugliest self.\

Ben Blum

Positive The New York Times \"Ranger Games raises bedeviling questions about the nature of human agency, and reminds us that we send everyday, messy people with everyday, messy hearts to fight our wars ... Ranger Games is in part a family story, about the unlikely bond between two very different cousins. It is also a fascinating tutorial on the psychology of modern warfare and social coercion ... The tragicomic chapters about this episode alone are worth the price of the book. I spun through them, the pages whipping by like an old-school Rolodex. If you already detest Dr. Phil, they will shore up your conviction that he is indeed worth detesting. Alex’s motives may be of personal interest to Blum, but the richest case study on display here — it would fit snugly into any psychological textbook — is of Sommer. He’s brilliant, seductive and dangerous, a Hannibal Lecter without the taste for human liver over fava beans...To keep the mystery going, Blum even periodically wonders whether he should believe Sommer. It feels like a narrative feint. That Sommer is a malignant lunatic is spectacularly obvious quite early on. Blum’s book suffers, too, from a slight engineering problem. He sometimes repeats parts of Alex’s story, ostensibly to layer them with more perspectives and information each time, but the information he adds is often insufficient to warrant the retellings ... But by the book’s end — it’s both surprising and moving — readers are likely to overlook these objections.\

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Mixed The New York Times What Happened is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald J. Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee. It is a rant against James B. Comey, Bernie Sanders, the media, James B. Comey, Vladimir Putin and James B. Comey. It is a primer on Russian spying. It is a thumping of Trump. It is worth reading ... Are there moments when What Happened is wearying, canned and disingenuous, spinning events like a top? Yes. Does it offer any new hypotheses about what doomed Clinton’s campaign? No. It merely synthesizes old ones; Clinton’s diagnostics are the least interesting part of the book. Is there a full chapter devoted to her email, clearly intended to make her own closing arguments in this case? Yes. She can’t shake her inner litigator. But this book is not just a perseverative recap of 2016. It is the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the female nominee of a major party, a first in American history ... You may have heard that What Happened is angry. It’s true. Or defiant, anyway. Love it or loathe it, chafe at it or cheer it; you will now see, for the first time, what it looks like when Clinton doesn’t spend all of her energy suppressing her irritation.

Danielle S. Allen

Mixed The New York Times ...a compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story ... Among the most valuable contributions Allen makes is forcing us to ask: To what end are we locking up our children? Are we not foreclosing their options before their lives have even begun? ... If Cuz were blighted by one or two unsightly clauses, I could have overlooked them. But there are many, and each jolted me out of my reading rhythm, as if a moth had landed on the page. She often has trouble conveying her emotions, too ... Allen’s analysis of gang culture — or 'the parastate,' as she calls it, with its own bylaws and tragic form of appeal — may be where she’s at her ferocious best. She points out that however strong the state is, the parastate is stronger — violate its rules, and you’re asking for death.

Bruce Handy

Mixed The New York Times Handy does not offer a kind of string theory for the universe of children’s classics, trying to reconcile competing visions of what motivated their authors or what makes kids respond to them. If you ever wondered, for example, why a surprising number of children’s authors are childless, do not look for theories here. Instead, Wild Things is relaxed, discursive and personal, a survey course centering on the writers to whom Handy especially responds ... The result is very pleasing to read, when it isn’t frustratingly glib, which I regret to report is too often. Why the members of Handy’s brain trust didn’t tell him to cut out the excessive antics, I have no clue ... Handy quotes liberally from each book he admires, and he curates those passages beautifully, allowing readers both literary pleasure and a kind of time travel. His analyses are affectionate and often eccentric. He’s got a magpie’s eye for odd and shiny details ... One of Handy’s strengths is that his brain tends toward unlikely analogies. But as the book goes on, these analogies increasingly become a tiresome nervous tic. After making a series of clever observations, Handy can’t resist capping them with a silly hat.

Finn Murphy

Positive The New York Times The Long Haul can be almost shamefully enjoyable, allowing readers to have their fix of 'fabulous-life-of' porn and class outrage, too. You wouldn’t believe the downpour of indignities and diminishments Murphy has weathered over the years ... Yet there’s a huge question at the heart of Murphy’s memoir, and it’s one he never answers: How did a guy like him — who falls asleep reading Jane Austen, who has a crush on Terry Gross — become a long-haul mover? Murphy gives us a partial explanation ... Midway through The Long Haul, he does something disconcerting and entirely unexpected: He gives up driving. For more than 20 years, if I’m calculating correctly. And he never says why...At just the moment our engagement with Murphy should deepen, it shallows. He gets his second act. But we never learn what went wrong in Act I ... There’s something occasionally mannered and artificial about his dialogue, which tends toward the screwball or the Socratic, depending on the moment. (Though at its best, it’s kind of great, as if Hepburn and Tracy were handed their own CBs) ... What redeems this book, time and time again, are the stories Murphy tells. My goodness, how astonishing they are, and how moving, and how funny, and how just plain weird.

Jeff Flake

Mixed The New York Times It’s striking how many influential figures in this slim volume he manages to impale with a stick and then lightly spit-roast. Newt Gingrich (a 'character with extraordinary talents for self-promotion'). Michael Flynn ('conspiracy theorist'). Alex Jones ('one of the most egregious polluters of civil discourse in America'). But above all others: Donald J. Trump ... Flake is the first elected official to cross this particular rhetorical Rubicon, and he seems to be imploring his colleagues to follow. He offers a despairing, unsparing indictment of everyone in Congress who went along with Trump’s election ... Conscience of a Conservative has an undeniable rhetorical power — it is fluid, well written, mature in tone. But Flake also has the material power to change things. How reconcilable are his words with his deeds? ... The primary intellectual failing of Conscience of a Conservative is that it doesn’t untangle the dysfunction in Washington from the dysfunction of his own party.

Gin Phillips

Rave The New York Times ...[an] expertly made thriller ... Part of the book’s great allure is that the reader feels as if this character, Joan, is working out each of her dilemmas in real time ... Our full visibility into Joan’s moment-to-moment reasoning is also what makes this novel so clever and irresistible. Fierce Kingdom is a portrait of a mind at work under macabre duress ... before Lincoln’s chatter is grating, it is endearing, and we never find him grating as a character; we fret about his safety from start to finish. Joan’s desire to protect him is total, feral Fierce Kingdom is a diabolical enactment of a mother’s most tortured and catastrophic thoughts.

Dina Nayeri

Positive The New York Times The strains and indignities that come with remaking a life are what give Refuge poignancy and relevance ... Nayeri’s prose can be rich and colorful, bolts of words prettily unfurling; it can also be florid, melodramatic — she sometimes writes with a heavy hand as well as a heavy heart, particularly in the last third of her book ... But Refuge also has the kind of immediacy commonly associated with memoir, which lends it heft, intimacy, atmosphere ... The novel may indulge in a few purple paragraphs too many. But that won’t stop many readers from responding to it with affection — and perhaps recognition. What person, in adulthood, doesn’t feel him- or herself twisting into impossible shapes?

Monica Hesse

Positive The New York Times A cautionary word, issued out of extreme admiration and enthusiasm for Monica Hesse’s American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land: Do not be deterred by its chewy beginning and gooey finish ... it’s clear that she has talent to burn. Its excesses notwithstanding — and there are a few others — American Fire is an excellent summer vacation companion. It has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex. It also happens to be a very good portrait of a region in economic decline ... As with S-Town and the best episodes of This American Life, Hesse has managed to wring tension and excitement out of a story with a known ending. One of the most elusive skills in narrative nonfiction, and Hesse has it, is knowing the proper order to arrange your facts.

Diksha Basu

Mixed The New York Times For readers who know little about modern India and are beach-novel curious (but too embarrassed to buy one), The Windfall may be the right sort of summer refreshment, providing just enough substance to defy the second part of the Seinfeld rule — 'No hugging, no learning' ... But if the final act of The Windfall suggests that money makes people bonkers, it also suggests that Basu didn’t know how to end her novel. After a madcap climax, she seems uncertain where to go, inexplicably carrying on almost exactly as she had before ... Is she a wicked satirist, a social critic, a writer of rom-coms? She needn’t choose, necessarily; but if she wants to be all three, she has to work out how to better integrate these parts of her author self. What a triple threat she’d be if she did.

Victor LaValle

Mixed The New York Times One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle’s novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them — they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob’s reward system. His imagination is unusually visual. His sensibility is so deadpan that it borders on a kind of derangement ... readers are always struggling to communicate the odd hybridity of LaValle’s work, which blends social criticism with horror with the supernatural, while remaining steadfastly literary. And it’s true: His novels are tough to classify. The difficulty with hybrids, though, is that they’re often more awkward than elegant. You see the exact ridge in the sinew where man becomes beast. The Changeling has some of this gracelessness ... How I wish The Changeling had been more artful in exploring these questions and ideas. I also could have done without the strained allusions to Donald J. Trump, Fox News and the far right, which seem to have blown in from some neighboring land until they finally reveal their connection. But Lavalle’s observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny.

Sarah Perry

Rave The New York Times Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent is a novel of almost insolent ambition — lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate. Set in the Victorian era, it’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. It’s wonderfully dense and serenely self-assured. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home ... Perry’s writing engages the senses. You can almost smell the brine, the oyster, the 'secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak' ... But the real abundance here is of feelings between characters, not all of them sentimental. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book in which a man and a woman quarrel quite so much, and quite so forcefully, without something devastating coming of it.

Jim Al-Khalili

Mixed The New York Times Read enough of Aliens, and you realize that the search for life is just as much about the most mundane aspects of biology as about the trippier questions of cosmology. But it is also about philosophy. In this search, it helps to know what life is ... The experience of reading almost any anthology is a bit like traveling across the country in a rental car with only an FM radio for company. Sometimes you get Sinatra; other times you get Nickelback. This collection has its share of Nickelback ... But the best of these essays are far out in more ways than one.

Richard Russo

Rave The New York Times ...the real revelation in Trajectory is 'Milton and Marcus,' the story of a down-on-his-luck novelist and sometime screenwriter who’s summoned to the home of a legendary actor ... Don’t let the wickedness of 'Milton and Marcus' fool you. It happens to be the most beautiful story in the book. And how much of it is true is beside the point. What matters is how it reflects the larger themes of Russo’s work. Jackson Hole is the ultimate foil to the decaying mill towns of Russo’s novels, and actors the ultimate foils to the low-esteem schlubs Russo writes about so well ... It will abruptly break your heart. That’s what Richard Russo does, without pretension or fuss, time and time again.

Édouard Louis, Trans. by Michael Lucey

Rave The New York Times \"Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy is the Hillbilly Elegy of France ... For anyone interested in learning about the white underclass that’s helped power the populist movements of Europe, it is an excellent and accessible place to begin ... The End of Eddy, however, is not just a remarkable ethnography. It is also a mesmerizing story about difference and adolescence, one that is far more realistic than most.\

Ivanka Trump

Pan The New York Times Book Review ...the book is not really offensive so much as witlessly derivative, endlessly recapitulating the wisdom of other, canonical self-help and business books ... And because Ivanka alone can fix our problems, she opens her book with a pasture full of straw men, including the argument that our culture isn’t having nuanced conversations about working mothers ... The book is manifestly the descendant of many TED talks and lifestyle websites. It’s perfect for a generation weaned on Pinterest and goop.com ... This is the sort of feminism that drives some women bananas, having less to do with structural change than individual fulfillment and accessorizing properly; perhaps it can even be achieved by wearing her fine jewelry or apparel, which she repeatedly mentions throughout the book (as well as her family’s tremendous hotels). There’s certainly a market for it. There’s also family precedent for it. Her father nearly annihilated his millions, and went on to write many successful business books. Why not Ivanka?

James Forman Jr.

Rave The New York Times ...[a] superb and shattering first book ... That is truly what this book is about, and what makes it tragic to the bone: How people, acting with the finest of intentions and the largest of hearts, could create a problem even more grievous than the one they were trying to solve ... This is the exceptionally delicate question that he tries to answer, with exemplary nuance, over the course of his book. His approach is compassionate. Seldom does he reprimand the actors in this story for the choices they made ... The stories he shares are not just carefully curated to make us think differently about criminal justice (though they will, particularly about that hallowed distinction between nonviolent drug offenders and everyone else); they are stories that made Forman himself think differently, and it’s in telling them that he sheds his cautious, measured self and becomes a brokenhearted, frustrated civil servant.

Elizabeth Strout

Rave The New York Times Where this book sharply departs from Strout’s previous work is in its frank, unapologetic emphasis on forbidden desire. Not a chapter spins by, practically, without the unveiling of some sexual secret ... Anything Is Possible is certainly more grim than Strout’s previous work. It’s more audacious, too, and more merciless, daring you to walk away ... But the writing is wrenchingly lovely. It almost always is with Strout, whether she’s knitting metaphors or summarizing, with agonizing economy, whole episodes of a life ... You read Strout, really, for the same reason you listen to a requiem: to experience the beauty in sadness.

Amy Goldstein

Rave The New York Times ...[a] moving and magnificently well-researched ethnography of a small Wisconsin factory city on economic life support ... [Goldstein] opts for complexity over facile explanations and easy polemics. (Neither Obama nor Ryan comes off looking particularly good; and no, she does not conclude that these layoffs put Donald J. Trump in the White House) ... Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis. The characters are especially memorable. This may be the first time since I began this job that I’ve wanted to send notes of admiration to three people in a work of nonfiction ... Janesville is eye-opening, important, a diligent work of reportage. I am sure Paul Ryan will read it. I wonder what he will say.

Laura Kipnis

Positive The New York Times It is invigorating and irritating, astute and facile, rigorous and flippant, fair-minded and score-settling, practical and hyperbolic, and maybe a dozen other neurotically contradictory things. Above all else, though, Unwanted Advances is necessary. Argue with the author, by all means. But few people have taken on the excesses of university culture with the brio that Kipnis has. Her anger gives her argument the energy of a live cable ... Now: I certainly appreciate Kipnis’s forensics. And the story she tells is psychologically complex. But one of the women in Ludlow’s case comes across as genuinely troubled...if that’s the case, isn’t that an argument in favor of forbidding relations between faculty and students? Because some students might not be able to handle them? ... Kipnis never minimizes the devastating consequences of sexual violence. And she’s on to something, really on to something, when she rails against the 'neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability.' But the most powerful and provocative part of her book, its final chapter, suggests that today’s young college women really do suffer from a crisis of agency. The pressure to drink themselves senseless and then hook up is so pervasive that they seem to have trouble saying no.

John A. Farrell

Rave The New York Times To read this biography with an eye only toward the parallels between the two presidents would be lazy and unfair, a disservice to Farrell’s nuanced scholarship. But the context here is unignorable. The similarities between Nixon and Trump leap off the page like crickets ... Like Trump, Nixon was a monomaniac on the stump, obsessed with the enemies lurking within. Nixon, too, had a penchant for sowing mayhem and a gourmand’s appetite for revenge, especially in the wee hours of the morning. (Trump tweets. Nixon made phone calls) ... He’s an electrifying subject, a muttering Lear, of perennial interest to anyone with even an average curiosity about politics or psychology. The real test of a good Nixon biography, given how many there are, is far simpler: Is it elegantly written? And, even more important, can it tolerate paradoxes and complexity, the spikier stuff that distinguishes real-life sinners from comic-book villains? The answer, in the case of Richard Nixon, is yes, on both counts.

Jaroslav Kalfar

Positive The New York Times Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia is not a perfect first effort. But it’s a frenetically imaginative one, booming with vitality and originality when it isn’t indulging in the occasional excess. Kalfar’s voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks. He has a great snout for the absurd. He has such a lively mind and so many ideas to explore that it only bothered me a little — well, more than a little, but less than usual — that this book peaked two-thirds of the way through ... Kalfar has an exhilarating flair for imagery. He writes boisterously and mordantly, like a philosophy grad student who’s had one too many vodka tonics at the faculty Christmas wingding. This is generally a good thing, though it can also mean periodic forays into pretentiousness.

Yuval Noah Harari

Mixed The New York Times ...lively, provocative and sure to be another hit among the pooh-bahs. But readers ought to be prepared: Almost every blithe pronouncement Harari makes (that 'the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms,' for instance) has been the exclusive subject of far more nuanced books, whose arguments have in turn been disputed by other intellectuals. I do not mean to knock the handiwork of a gifted thinker and a precocious mind. But I do mean to caution against the easy charms of potted history ... This dystopian vision rests on many questionable assumptions, of course. One of them is that we don’t have free will, and never did, a philosophical question that Harari insists on treating as settled ... Harari promises that Homo Deus is not a prophecy. Let’s hope so.

Michael Finkel

Positive The New York Times It’s campfire-friendly and thermos-ready, easily drained in one warm, rummy slug. It also raises a variety of profound questions — about the role of solitude, about the value of suffering, about the diversity of human needs ... A few sentences in this book are sprayed with that inexplicable men’s-magazine hyperbole cologne ... Finkel, to whom Knight gave stunning access while in jail — especially for a hermit — also does a fine job conveying the idiosyncrasies of his subject’s character ... The Stranger in the Woods is involving and well-told; it certainly casts its spell. But there are inconsistencies in Knight’s story.

Khaled Khalifa

Positive The New York Times Khaled Khalifa writes about his native city with sensuality and an almost feral intensity in his new novel. The book focuses on just one family, and it stops several years short of the Syrian civil war. But it offers a glimpse into how terrified and empty of hope the people of a city must be to rise up in revolt. The future offers them nothing. It is a castle of closed doors ... no synopsis can give a sense of what reading this book is like. Mr. Khalifa’s story is episodic rather than linear; it is more about an atmosphere, both emotional and physical, than any defining event. The author writes in lush, pungent prose, some of it overripe, like a fermented banana. But some of it is also beautiful ... Mr. Khalifa is interested in erotic desire — and its repression. He lingers over it, conjuring some of the most graphic depictions of sex (in hotel rooms, in prisons, in the recesses of the imagination) I’ve read all year. No Knives in the Kitchens of This City meanders a great deal. At moments, it can be slow and hard to follow; its characters sometimes act in ways that make little sense, even by the erratic standards of human behavior in dictatorships. But the sights, smells and horror of living in Aleppo come pounding to life in this book.

Bill Hayes

Positive The New York Times Read just 50 pages, and you’ll see easily enough how Hayes is Sacks’s logical complement. Though possessed of different temperaments, both are alive to difference, variety, the possibilities of our rangy humanity; both are avid chroniclers of our species — Sacks in his case studies, and Hayes in his character sketches of the people he meets in the street. Hayes is a true flâneur, a man who actively engages the city with all of his senses ... I adore this observation. Yet readers should be warned: Hayes’s writing can also be terribly precious ... Hayes’s poetry is pedestrian, but his street photographs are not. They are frank, beautiful, bewitching — they unmask their subjects’ best and truest selves. And his account of Sacks’s final months will no doubt inspire many readers.

Sheelah Kolhatkar

Rave The New York Times Kolhatkar’s Black Edge tells it depressingly well. Justice is not served. The little guy does not triumph ... If Black Edge weren’t about real life, it would be an uncomplicated pleasure to read. The book is many things: a Wall Street primer; a procedural drama; a modern version of Moby-Dick, with wiretaps rather than harpoons. Kolhatkar, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former hedge fund analyst, expertly synthesizes an enormous amount of material, including court documents and hundreds of her own interviews ... Kolhatkar never reduces anyone in Black Edge to a stone-gargoyle grotesque. But Cohen certainly goes across the street and around the corner to reify certain stereotypes about hedge fund managers ... my hunch is that readers will most remember Black Edge for showing them just how alarmingly pervasive insider trading was in the years surrounding the 2008 collapse.

Amy Gary

Pan The New York Times Brown may have led a vibrant, colorful life. But Gary only manages to render her in shades of taupe. Her sentences are strictly utilitarian. Her early pages are teeming with dead-end digressions ... Far more baffling — criminal, actually — is that Brown’s voice is absent, entirely, from In the Great Green Room until the final page. Here is a woman who left behind diaries, letters and papers of all kinds. Why are we not hearing from this thrilling creature, celebrated for her ear, renowned for her sound? ... Instead, we get Gary’s. She is a strangely passive-aggressive biographer — too timid to analyze Brown’s life in any large and meaningful way, yet presumptuous enough to speak for her ... This seems a terrible missed opportunity.

Ayelet Waldman

Mixed The New York Times Just because she doesn’t have a picturesque version of melancholy doesn’t make it any less real or any less deserving of compassion. And after reading A Really Good Day, you understand just why Ms. Waldman might have been willing to experiment to find relief ... The reader doesn’t have quite as uniformly positive an experience. Part of the problem is aesthetic: Ms. Waldman has a tendency to slide into the prefab language of psychotherapy or self-help. Her sense of humor can be unsubtle...And her observations can be trite ... But then Ms. Waldman will capture you with genuinely brave and human moments, like when she confesses that she yells at people because she enjoys it ... Ms. Waldman’s survey of the history and literature of psychotropic drugs is informative, though it can also, on occasion, be too sloppy and loose ... Whatever her foibles or stylistic lapses, she makes a persuasive case for the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

Emily Fridlund

Pan The New York Times ...here is the danger in withholding crucial information from your readers for so long: Eventually they expect their uncertainty to be rewarded, preferably with interest. This does not happen in History of Wolves, as promisingly as it starts out. I sensed where Ms. Fridlund was heading before she started dropping explicit clues, and even if I hadn’t, I suspect I’d have been underwhelmed. Those thunderheads massing on the horizon let loose only a weak drizzle ... History of Wolves contains the kernels of many possible novels, with lots of larger ideas to plumb...[but] all the ideas in the world can’t make a great novel. It’s what you do with them that matters.

Ratika Kapur

Rave The New York Times Renu, the mesmerizing narrator in Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, has a gift for self-deception. It is baffling, then funny, and then quite poignant to witness ... The story it tells is taut, focused; its wider setting, the new India, pops with life. But the real star of this show is Renu, the Mrs. Sharma of the book’s title. She starts in one dimension, then gradually plumps into three.

Paul Bloom

Positive The New York Times ... too highbrow to be a self-help or parenting manual, but parts of it could be. Its wingspan is too wide to be a simple guide to philanthropy, but parts of it could be that as well. And it’s a bit too clotted with caveats to be a seamless read, which is a shame, because it could have been, with more shaping ... Look past the book’s occasional loop-the-loops and intellectual fillips. Against Empathy is an invigorating, relevant and often very funny re-evaluation of empathy ... he is by no means making the case for heartlessness. His point, rather, is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture of caring and detached cost-benefit analysis. His book is a systematic attempt to show why this is so ... More than any book I’ve read this year, Against Empathy is an overt, joyful conversation with readers.

Michael Lewis

Positive The New York Times At its peak, the book combines intellectual rigor with complex portraiture. During its final pages, I was blinking back tears, hardly your typical reaction to a book about a pair of academic psychologists. The reason is simple. Mr. Lewis has written one hell of a love story, and a tragic one at that. The book is particularly good at capturing the agony of the one who loves the more ... this book could stand a bit of trimming, and readers should ready themselves for tougher meat than they might be expecting to chew ... In The Undoing Project, Mr. Lewis has found the granddaddy of all stories about counterintuition, because Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky did some of the most definitive research about just how majestically, fantastically unreliable our intuition can be.

David Oshinsky

Positive The New York Times Any exciting book about the history of Bellevue — which this one surely is — is destined to be as much about the history of disease, medicine and New York City as about the hospital itself. Mr. Oshinsky’s chapters about the early days of medicine are especially, distractingly interesting — so much so that they’ll inspire you to read them aloud to anyone who’ll listen ... The book offers an eye-opening lesson on how the two-tiered system of health care started in this country ... [Oshinsky] has a lovely flair for detail. His chapter about the AIDS crisis, which tested the mettle of many physicians — they were at once afraid for their health and demoralized by their powerlessness — is moving and humane ... At times, however, Mr. Oshinsky’s sourcing is inexplicably sloppy ... Most baffling of all, there’s no discussion of Bellevue’s famous services for survivors of torture.

Megyn Kelly

Mixed The New York Times ...her memoir is a reminder that she is a complicated feminist figure — starting with the fact that she rejects the label 'feminist.' The needle she threads has an almost microscopic eye. She is trying simultaneously to appeal to both her new 'Lean-In' fan base and the regular Fox news watchers who abhor identity politics ... This book will doubtless have sex appeal among gossips and Kelly obsessives. But the author wants to do more than tell a juicy story. She’s positioned this book as a self-help guide ... Me, I’m not feeling it. Like most superstars, Ms. Kelly is a metabolic anomaly. She’s willed herself into her own spectacular existence. Along the way, she got the best of the next president of the United States. And the worst.

Michael McCarthy

Mixed The New York Times ...much more than a paean to the Earth’s beauty. It is also an elegy for it, and a particularly distressed one at that ... I take no issue with this emotional — and at times, unabashedly spiritual — line of appeal. I do, however, take issue with Mr. McCarthy’s pecking this same note with the assiduousness of the Chinatown chicken ... Mr. McCarthy is certainly a personable companion, prone to bursts of eccentric charm ... Mr. McCarthy has more than enough descriptive power to drive this book. It’s only when the engine overheats that his readers start to squirm.

Tim Wu

Positive The New York Times The Attention Merchants is more survey than treatise. Few chapters offer startling new arguments, though Mr. Wu is well attuned to paradoxes and ironies ... Only in the last 50 pages, when he appraises the excesses of the modern internet does Mr. Wu turn savage, sinking enough venom into Twitter and Instagram to kill a baby monkey ... [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet ... Mr. Wu’s chapters about the early days of advertising are some of this book’s most enjoyable, easily serving as a reader’s companion to Mad Men.

Gary Younge

Rave The New York Times ...exactingly argued, fluidly written and extremely upsetting ... But Mr. Younge makes for a personable, unusual narrator. As a Briton, he brings a fresh perspective to this topic. As a father and a man of Barbadian descent, his interest in it is also personal ... What is perhaps most disheartening and eye-opening about Mr. Younge’s book is the fatalism he discovers in the communities most affected by gun violence.

Riad Sattouf

Rave The New York Times Even without a shard of context, Mr. Sattouf’s story and storytelling would be irresistible ... The series is very funny. Particularly this second installment, which takes place over the course of a single year, 1984-85 ... Living betwixt and between cultures may be Mr. Sattouf’s destiny. It was hard on him as a child, and it may remain so in adulthood. But it makes for exceptionally good art.

Patrick Phillips

Rave The New York Times ...an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations ... [Phillips] did a heroic amount of archival spelunking to tell this story, one that still humanizes its subjects and brims with details ... Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once ... But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of Blood at the Root or even how involving it is.

Alexander Weinstein

Positive The New York Times This is not an impeccable book. Going through it is a bit like going through a carwash, with alternating spells of monotony and liveliness; some parts are messier than others. But the best of Mr. Weinstein’s stories whistle with a cockeyed, formidable intelligence, and he is not afraid to provoke ... At his least artful moments, Mr. Weinstein’s stories are too literal, and his moral takeaways, too obvious ... But at their finest, Mr. Weinstein’s stories contain moments of moral complexity and, even more challenging — and more moving — moments of grace.

Candice Millard

Positive The New York Times ...her book is much shorter on the anxiety of influence and far longer on the blustery impatience of youth. In Ms. Millard’s retelling, young Churchill was entitled, precocious, supernaturally confident — one of those fellows whose neon self-regard is downright unseemly until the very moment it is earned ... as involving as a popcorn thriller. Ms. Millard does an excellent job conveying the drama of confinement, both inside the prison and out ... What’s striking is the high volume of evidence Ms. Millard has compiled to show how unswervingly he believed in his own majestic destiny more than 40 years before he fulfilled it.

Tracy Kidder

Mixed The New York Times ...a book about a software guy and software culture in 2016 isn’t nearly as novel as a book about hardware guys and hardware culture in 1981, and Mr. Kidder is not in the same command of his material. He seems much more like a fellow who’s stepped off a cruise ship for an afternoon than like someone who’s spent many months inhabiting Mr. English’s world ... Mr. Kidder’s portrayal of living with manic depression is as nuanced and intimate as a reader might ever expect to get ... [the conclusion] feels a bit arbitrary, much like the book itself. But you can’t help admiring Mr. English and cheering for him.

Ann Patchett

Rave The New York Times ...[an] exquisite new novel ... Commonwealth spans over 50 years, and the stories of how these children move uncertainly into adulthood — and how their parents adjust to the misfortunes that accrue — are painfully beautiful.

Belle Boggs

Positive The New York Times [Boggs'] book is a corrective and a tonic, a primer and a dispeller of myths. It is likely to become a go-to guide for the many couples who discover that having children is not the no-assembly-required experience they were expecting. They will come away enlightened, reassured and comforted by her debunker mentality ... These discussions aren’t always earth-shattering. Some, like her rehash of the custody battle over Baby M, are downright rote ... Yet Ms. Boggs has done something quite lovely and laudable with The Art of Waiting: She’s given a cold, clinical topic some much-needed warmth and soul.

Luke Dittrich

Positive The New York Times [The first two-thirds] are an exciting, artful blend of family and medical history — expertly structured, told in a jiggly, vérité style. They make clear that H.M.’s surgery did not happen in a vacuum. It was part of a much larger and unseemly trend ... Any book with neuroscience this complex and content this provocative really needs footnotes. This book has none. Zero. And that’s just weird. If Mr. Dittrich is going to insist on stringent documentation from M.I.T., he ought to do the same himself. This controversy, however, should not obscure the fine personal and historical story Mr. Dittrich tells, which remains the most interesting material in the book.

J.D. Vance

Rave The New York Times ...a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump. Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans ... Whether you agree with Mr. Vance or not, you must admire him for his head-on confrontation with a taboo subject.

Madeleine Thien

Rave The New York Times ...a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art; it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents ... The larger saga unfurls like silk — and proves similarly resistant to knots, a testament to Ms. Thien’s storytelling skills ... Ms. Thien captures painfully well the depersonalization and numbness of living through the Cultural Revolution.

Rosa Brooks

Positive The New York Times At its finest, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything is a dynamic work of reportage, punctuated by savory details ... When Ms. Brooks’s book lives up to its subtitle it delights. The author is a chipper field guide and canny ethnographer, writing with refreshing honesty about the folkways of the Defense Department, which often confound outsiders ... Ms. Brooks’s writing possesses a few grating tics...I also sometimes wondered who Ms. Brooks was writing for.

Ariel Leve

Positive The New York Times [A] painful, strangely mesmerizing memoir ... You could therefore view An Abbreviated Life as an act of supreme vengeance. But I have a different theory: After living through so many years of uncontrolled hysteria and histrionics, Ms. Leve badly pines for witnesses ... The book is a portrait of something familiar gone wildly, tragically awry ... At times Ms. Leve goes overboard when she gets into the clinical aspects of what she suffered.

Megan Abbott

Positive The New York Times [Abbott] is in top form in this novel. She resumes her customary role of black cat, opaque and unblinking, filling her readers with queasy suspicion at every turn ... You Will Know Me revisits some of the author’s favorite themes — community hysteria, the chaos of adolescent sexuality — but with a slight twist. Usually, teen-girl misanthropy and anxiety figure prominently into Ms. Abbott’s novels. Here, the author is far more interested in the way adults recapitulate teenage behaviors, fretting and sniping and stirring the pot ... What clearly intrigues Ms. Abbott about gymnastics is the way it offers girls a means to master pain and take control of their bodies — particularly as they get older, when their desires and hormones are raging out of control.

Gerri Hirshey

Positive The New York Times [Hirshey] is a studious and generous biographer, embracing the philosophy of the Crunch gym chain — 'No judgments' — when approaching her subject. The debate about whether Brown was good for feminism does not interest her. 'She was a realist,' the author writes, 'not a revolutionary.' This attitude has clear advantages. It frees Ms. Hirshey to do a compassionate, psychologically complex biography, arguing the world from her subject’s point of view. Brown, who could run the risk of appearing like a caricature, never once does so here...At 500 pages, though, this book could have lost about a third of its weight without readers’ noticing.

Jonah Lehrer

Pan The New York Times Mr. Lehrer could have written something complex and considered. Books are still the slow food of the publishing business. Yet here is Mr. Lehrer, once again, serving us a nonfiction McMuffin ... His book is insolently unoriginal ... This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be knocked down ... There’s a lot of dime-store counsel in this book, often followed by academic citations. It’s like reading an advice column by way of JSTOR ... Perhaps Mr. Lehrer has changed — personally. But not sufficiently as a writer. I fear it may be time, at long last, for him to find something else to do.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Rave The New York Times \"This lithe, artfully-plotted debut concerns itself with the lives of those for whom tourists can barely be bothered to remove their Ray-Bans ... Much of the dialogue in Here Comes the Sun is written in this patois. It’s one of the book’s incidental pleasures, its own melodious tune ... Margot is one of the reasons to read this book. She is a startling, deeply memorable character. All of Ms. Dennis-Benn’s women are. The author has a gift for creating chiaroscuro portraits, capturing both light and dark. In almost every scene, she conveys how the molecules shift around Margot, the air vibrating with the tension between her stone-cold resolve and her electric sexuality ... Here Comes the Sun is deceptively well-constructed, with slow and painful reveals right through the end. Just who’s able to give history the slip, and at what cost, is one of the saddest things you’ll ever read.\

Peter D. Kramer

Positive The New York Times A bit of advice before reading Peter D. Kramer’s timely book, Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants: Skip the preface. There’s too much Peter Kramer in it, and it’s off-putting ... I carp because I care. In Ordinarily Well, Dr. Kramer, who has written so well about the curse of melancholia — that thief who steals your blood and slyly replaces it with lead — has done something very valuable: He has waded into the contentious debate about the efficacy of antidepressants. It’s an important and confusing subject. One in eight Americans rely on these medications, hardly a trivial number. Dr. Kramer shouldn’t risk losing readers so early in the climb with rickety little cairns of humblebrag ... Ordinarily Well can be slow going. While I delight as much as Dr. Kramer does in scrutinizing studies for flaws in design and execution — he talks effect sizes, dropout biases, additivity — his writing is maddeningly turgid in places. But stick with him. He has done some much-needed synthesizing and debunking ... my favorite chapters, by a long chalk, are his 'interludes' describing his own experience treating patients. They are beautiful, philosophical, ambivalent — brimming with all the humility that his opening pages lack.

Susan Faludi

Rave The New York Times In the Darkroom is an absolute stunner of a memoir — probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect. Ms. Faludi is determined both to demystify the father of her youth — 'a simultaneously inscrutable and volatile presence, a black box and a detonator' — and to re-examine the very notion and nature of identity. In doing so, she challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about transsexuality ... in telling her father’s story, Ms. Faludi is also adding a layer of complexity to this evolving canon of literature, and she’s doing it with typical brio ... What Ms. Faludi eventually suspects is that her father’s late-in-life decision to change sexes may be determined by a much broader variety of personal and historical forces, and that gender, as she has long argued, is more fluid than we’d like to believe ... As In the Darkroom progresses, it becomes clear that Ms. Faludi’s father will always elude explanation. The real Rosebud the author provides is her own. Her identity as a feminist, she realizes, sprang from her father’s 'desperation to assert the masculine persona he had chosen.'”

Dan Vyleta

Mixed The New York Times I read the first half with a frenetic intensity, though as the book went on, with a mild annoyance, too. Mr. Vyleta, known in Canada and Britain for his atmospheric, well-made thrillers (including The Quiet Twin and The Crooked Maid), writes with intricacy and imagination and skillful pacing; never once would I have considered putting his book down. But when he wants to make a point, he plays with a heavy hand — fortissimo, when piano would have done.

Sebastian Junger

Positive The New York Times Mr. Junger has raised one of the most provocative ideas of this campaign season — and accidentally written one of its most intriguing political books. All without mentioning a single candidate, or even the president, by name ... There’s a numbingly familiar quality to much of the social science research he cites. It is not exactly news that nations with large income disparities are less happy than those without them, or that group cooperation increases levels of oxytocin, the bonding hormone ... But Mr. Junger’s most powerful — and surprising — argument is the one he makes about the military’s epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Mixed The New York Times Many of the same qualities that made The Emperor of All Maladies so pleasurable are in full bloom in The Gene. The book is compassionate, tautly synthesized, packed with unfamiliar details about familiar people (Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, used to rank the beauty of women on the street by 'using pinpricks on a card hidden in his pocket.' Ick.) But there are also crucial differences. Cancer is the troll that scratches and thumps beneath the floorboards of our consciousness, if it hasn’t already beaten its way into the room ... There are far fewer psychological stakes in reading about the history of genetics.

Andi Zeisler

Mixed The New York Times Much of Ms. Zeisler’s analysis, as trenchant as it is, often focuses less on ground realities than on epiphenomena — questions of how women are represented in popular culture, questions of what is and isn’t a feminist issue...I understand that We Were Feminists Once is a book of pop culture and media criticism. But if you chase after every outrage in the media micro-cycle, you’re inevitably, if unconsciously, going to get sucked into the very meta-debates that you’re railing against. Before you know it, your own commentary becomes a whistling, six-burner range of tempests in teapots. After reading Ms. Zeisler so expertly catalog all the fake issues that are diverting women away from the real ones, I personally started to pine for a more substantive discussion about those very issues — and not another analysis of Emma Watson’s feminism...Ms. Zeisler has written a funny, polished, intrepid book. But I ask that she aim for something wonkier next time. Though if she writes about the wage gap, family leave policies and all those other difficult, virtuous things, Lord knows if that book would sell as well.

Neal Gabler

Mixed The New York Times This is not, it should be said, a particularly original thesis. But it doesn’t seem to have been Mr. Gabler’s intention to write a groundbreaking book so much as to write a spirited and entertaining cultural appreciation. (He never interviewed Ms. Streisand.) Generally, he succeeds, though at times his appreciation is so full of treacle that it’s a wonder the pages don’t stick together. Anyone with a serious distaste for Ms. Streisand would be advised to dine at some other establishment.

Steve Silberman

Positive The New York Times Book Review ...[an] ambitious, meticulous and largehearted (if occasionally long-winded) history ... The implications here are staggering: Had the definition included Asperger’s original, expansive vision, it’s quite possible we wouldn’t have been hunting for environmental causes or pointing our fingers at anxious parents. This is, without a doubt, a provocative argument that Silberman is making, one sure to draw plenty of pushback and anger. But he traces his history with scrupulous precision, and along the way he treats us to charming, pointillist portraits of historical figures who are presumed to have had Asperger’s ... His book drags in places. Almost every character who appears in NeuroTribes, no matter how minor, is supplied with a back story so long it reaches a vanishing point.

Matti Friedman

Positive The New York Times For me though, the most involving passages in Pumpkinflowers are not about politics. They are about Mr. Friedman’s personal war stories. An infantryman’s experience of battle is invariably at odds with the official record, which is linear, vectored, clear. But a truly fine war memoir — and Pumpkinflowers is certainly one — almost always shows just how disorienting and ambiguous combat can be.

Geoff Dyer

Positive The New York Times Mr. Dyer is keenly, almost achingly, aware of our own impermanence. His imagination, you could say, has a built-in time-lapse function. He sees a lifetime of past and future boredom in a museum guard’s face; the sight of a particular soccer field immediately induces 'a vision of its own demise'; 'The Lightning Field' makes him wonder what aliens will make of it long after humans are gone.

Catherine Newman

Mixed The New York Times ...writing about toddlers, whose challenges are all pretty similar requires one kind of skill: You’ve got to be able to make the banal seem surprising. Boy, can Ms. Newman do that. Writing about older children, though, requires different gifts ... She appears to have left the page and been replaced with artisanal co-op mom. What started as a ring-a-ding vaudeville act, with Ms. Newman as the star stooge, descends uncomfortably into a series of soliloquies about imparting liberal values to children, which contain more than a few notes of self-congratulation.

Molly Prentiss

Positive The New York Times New York is its own dynamic character in Ms. Prentiss’s hands. It’s a city of towering grime, with graffitied koans on the sidewalks and store windows that advertise 'BEST PORN IN TOWN XXX.' Her book falls neatly into the current New York grit nostalgia, captured in Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire and HBO’s Vinyl ... Ms. Prentiss concludes her novel on a note that’s both ethereal and brutally realistic. She cauterizes wounds, but they’re still visible and bare. But for her characters — for this promising author — it’s enough.

Jonathan Lee

Rave The New York Times Rather than slavishly recreating the Brighton bombing in its every detail, Mr. Lee freestyles, creating a sympathetic ensemble both at the Grand Hotel and in the streets of Belfast — the book tacks back and forth between the two — all while making expert use of the dramatic tension inherent in waiting for a lethal explosion...There’s great range and compassion and high-definition imagery in Mr. Lee’s writing.

Laura Cumming

Rave The New York Times The Vanishing Velázquez is a sumptuous, impressively erudite effort by Laura Cumming to retrace Snare’s attempts to determine the painting’s elusive pedigree. But it’s a good deal more than that. The book is a pair of biographies (Snare, Velázquez), a series of critical essays, a history of King Philip’s IV court, a cold-case mystery, a courtroom drama, an adventure story, a travelogue, a floor wax, a dessert topping. Whatever it is, it’s extremely accomplished — a gleaming work of someone at the peak of her craft.

Katie Roiphe

Positive The New York Times Death is an excellent subject for Ms. Roiphe, who delights in exploring subjects that upset us. A psychoanalyst might say that her interest in this topic is also overdetermined: As a child, she had a pneumonia so dangerous and acute the doctors removed half of one of her lungs. My only objection to her book is that it does not precisely deliver on what it promises: a look at writers in their last throes. Ms. Roiphe is, in her heart, a critic, with sensibilities heavily inflected by the work of Freud. Which means these essays, at their finest, are often literary analyses.

Glen Weldon

Positive The New York Times The book is, in many respects, a roaring getaway car of guilty pleasures — film gossip, comic-book esoterica, hilarious tales of nerd rage ... There are a few times when the biggest villain in this book is not the Riddler but the Straw Man, a rhetorical device of which Mr. Weldon can be overly fond. And occasionally, Mr. Weldon becomes Comic Book Guy in spite of himself, writing with the same pedantry and fastidiousness.

Janna Levin

Pan The New York Times Ms. Levin’s first few chapters start strongly enough. She profiles the physicists who showed, despite widespread skepticism, an early and unwavering belief in gravitational waves, collaborating across institutions and nations to build the equipment that would ultimately prove their existence ... [she] starts to lose her footing the moment she begins telling the story, rather than scribbling character sketches. Her narrative often devolves into an inside-baseball account of a very long, very slow season with a host of very grouchy managers.

Adam Cohen

Pan The New York Times An unsuspecting innocent, an ambitious country doctor, a nation briefly infatuated with a despicable ideology — these would all seem to be the elements of a captivating narrative. Yet Imbeciles is often a boggy read, and a disorganized one at that. Mr. Cohen, now a senior writer at Time magazine, repeats himself early and often, which suggests that the basic outline of a propulsive story eluded him...He takes the reader down a couple of biographical sinkholes, giving us pages of back stories when a simple paragraph would have done the trick.

Matthew Desmond

Rave The New York Times ...an exhaustively researched, vividly realized and, above all, unignorable book — after Evicted, it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing. Like Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, or Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, this sweeping, yearslong project makes us consider inequality and economic justice in ways we previously had not. It’s sure to capture the attention of politicians. (Hillary, what are you reading this summer?) Through data and analysis and storytelling, it issues a call to arms without ever once raising its voice.

Chris Offutt

Rave The New York Times Through it all, Mr. Offutt somehow manages to summon compassion for his father. That, ultimately, is what makes this memoir so unexpectedly moving ... he pities his father’s loneliness, for being sentenced to a lifetime preoccupation with torture and a headful of savage sexual fantasies, predicated on the harming of innocents.

Paolo Giordano, Trans. by Anne Milano Appel

Positive The New York Times This may sound terribly bleak. But bleakness isn’t the overall mood of Like Family, nor is it the final note the book sounds; rather, it’s melancholy, and there’s a world of difference. The characters in Like Family know what hope is. They know joy, they know love. They are in pain because they know that illusions are often required to sustain these feelings.

Sonia Shah

Mixed The New York Times For those who don’t know much about the history of cholera, Ms. Shah’s dense, compact book is a decent primer ... Perhaps my favorite chapter, though, is about waste — or, as Ms. Shah puts it, 'the rising tide of feculence.' Nothing seems to awaken the muse in Ms. Shah like excreta, the ideal delivery system for all kinds of diseases.

Maylis de Kerangal, Trans. by Sam Taylor

Rave The New York Times \"Ms. de Kerangal’s long, rolling sentences pulse along in systolic thumps, each beat punctuated by a comma; they’re packed with emotional intensity and florid imagery, and they’ve been superbly translated by Sam Taylor ... The entire hospital in this book pounds with life.\

Volker Weidermann

Mixed The New York Times I enjoyed getting lost in the book’s melodies, but I also found its airiness dissatisfying in places; I longed for sharp analysis where there was only atmosphere. The first few chapters and subtitle both suggest that the book will be about the friendship between Zweig and Roth, as complicated a relationship as one might imagine. But their story fades from view until the end of the book.

Elizabeth McKenzie

Rave The New York Times For all its charm, bounce, radiant eccentrics and diverting episodes involving drug companies and squirrels, that is what The Portable Veblen is about: shaking the demented ghosts of our youth so that we can bind with clean spirits to someone in our adulthood.

Paul Lisicky

Rave The New York Times Very beautiful ... Mr. Lisicky has a gift for understanding suffering, an added bundle of receptors for detecting loneliness.

Jo Marchant

Positive The New York Times Ms. Marchant has chosen very moving characters to show us the importance of the research she discusses — we forget that those who turn to alternative medicine are often people in extremis — and she possesses an equal flair for finding inspirational figures.

Michael Cunningham

Pan The New York Times He tells his stories with the same louche, ominous disdain of the M.C. in Cabaret...It’s positively delectable. I had no idea Mr. Cunningham had it in him.

Maria Konnikova

Pan The New York Times Usually, the complaint about social-science writing is that authors cherry-pick their data to support a slick argument. That isn’t Ms. Konnikova’s problem. Her problem is that she’s shaken the entire tree. In each chapter, she fills page after page with study after study, all generally in the service of making rather similar points.

Ben Rawlence

Positive The New York Times [an] ambitious, morally urgent new book ... Mr. Rawlence tells the story of Dadaab both at ground level and high altitude, alternating between portraits of its residents and big-picture accounts of the regional turmoil that drove them there...In theory, this structure makes perfect sense; in practice, it takes an experienced writer to make a seamless blend of personal and political stories, and this book has some conspicuous ridges and lumps.

Hannah Rothschild

Positive New York Times The book may on occasion be silly and over-the-top, even for a satire. But Ms. Rothschild writes with such exuberance and spins such a propulsive yarn that you happily accept these excesses as part of the package, the same way you happily accept the frippery of Elton John.

Jay Parini

Pan The New York Times Mr. Parini fills page after page with plot summaries of Vidal’s work — even the pulp he penned under the names of Edgar Box and Katherine Everard, even the novels available only on Amazon Marketplace. Any literary biography runs this risk...but here, this tic is especially pronounced, to the point that the biography feels like an exercise in slaloming through SparkNotes.

Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Positive The New York Times Notorious RBG may be a playful project, but it asks to be read seriously. It’s an artisanal hagiography, a frank and admiring piece of fan nonfiction...That I responded so personally to it is a testimony to Ms. Carmon’s storytelling and panache.

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November 5, 2024