MixedThe New York Times Book Review... an ambitious and commendable effort that falls a bit short of the subject matter’s tantalizing potential — a solid journalistic account that might have been elevated into an enduring work of narrative nonfiction ... It’s a story with endless narrative possibilities. Mufti ably assembles all the pieces and deftly covers the relevant history, but he leans only partway into the epic, messy sprawl before him. I kept wanting him to luxuriate in his wild saga and take a more novelistic approach to his rich material. He might, for instance, have expanded his brief biographical sketches of some of the book’s peripheral figures into fuller portraits, and dwelled more searchingly on the complicated, beguiling Khaalis. Mufti answers all the journalistic questions — no small job — but he might have pondered some other ones too in order to give American Caliph a deeper resonance. What drew him to the story to begin with? What does it have to tell us about race, religious fundamentalism and our country’s fraught relationship with Islam? Why is it more than just a forgotten chapter in modern American history? ... Mufti’s ticktock of the siege, the book’s climactic centerpiece, is a tour de force.
Colum McCann
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewThe walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit, the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical possibilities of the walker — the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of divine delight being carried out between two buildings that would one day be so viciously and murderously destroyed — are hard to ignore, particularly in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss … It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one. Through their anguish, McCann’s characters manage to find comfort, even a kind of redemption.
Kim Phillips-Fein
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s a refreshingly counterintuitive point of view. The conventional wisdom has always been that New York had reached a point where it simply could no longer afford such an expansive network of public institutions and services. Sacrifices were necessary...But, as Phillips-Fein argues, none of this was a foregone conclusion when the city first confronted the fiscal crisis. She revisits the familiar story with fresh eyes, seeing it not as part of an inexorable, if painful, evolution but as a battle between two competing views of the city and its government ... What else might have been possible? This is the one realm in which this powerful and involving work of narrative history comes up short. Phillips-Fein makes a convincing argument that the city’s abandonment of its liberal ideals was a choice. What she doesn’t do is offer a different path, imagine an alternative history for New York.
Maria Konnikova
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review“The stories in The Confidence Game can feel a bit clipped and superficial ... But this may be more of a statement about the endlessly juicy possibilities of the subject matter rather than a criticism of the shortcomings of the book.
