PositiveNewsdayIf there are any qualities that distinguish Marlantes' novel above others — beyond, say, its sturdy characterizations, unblinking attention to detail and sprinting narrative — it's the combination of immediacy and naiveté that permeates its pages, across which some very young men scramble lest they not grow old … Marlantes' descriptions of battle are exhilarating, but his portrait of warriors at rest is even better — the boredom, the short tempers, the jungle rot, the gangrenous feet, even the leech which, early in the book, crawls up a soldier's urethra — are all made vivid and horrifying … Honor and camaraderie trump good sense and self-preservation in Matterhorn, where anyone is likely to die at any moment, or do something amazing.
Stephen King
MixedNewsday...if the stories in Full Dark, No Stars are hard to read, it isn't because they're violent, gruesome or dark, all of which they most certainly are. It's that King himself hasn't taken this particular job very seriously –– not if that responsibility includes the creation of believable characters and plausible situations, even within the kind of inherently implausible universe King regularly conjures up ... In his best work, you feel that King has his chummy arm around you even while he's trying to make you wet your pants. Here, King can't get out of his characters' way: The banal observations, the petty gripes, the clumsy asides are not just distracting but annoying ... Full Dark, No Stars isn't a horrifying development. But it's a little worrisome.
Glenn Frankel
PositiveNewsday\"Much of his broader story has been told before, and Frankel sometimes manages the neat trick of spinning out prose that is both breathless and burdened with minutiae. But by surveying the era through one film, he both distills and refines ... High Noon — either the book or the movie — couldn’t be more timely.\
Molly Haskell
RaveNewsdayBut as interesting as Spielberg is — and he surely is, by virtue of being America’s pre-eminent on-screen 'entertainer' for the last four decades — what’s equally captivating is Haskell’s wrestling match with herself. What she constantly mediates in A Life in Films is the tension between her personal taste and Spielberg’s obvious gifts as both a storyteller and technician. What she delivers is as balanced a judgment on the director’s life and works as one might possibly expect ... Haskell really gets in a groove when she approaches Spielberg from a feminist perspective, which is not surprising ... It’s a high compliment to any book that when it ends, you wish it wouldn’t.
