MixedThe Wall Street JournalDangerous Ideas does reproduce some erroneous ideas ... Mr. Berkowitz is nostalgic for an era when a few anchormen and editors decided what was real news. But after much agonizing, the author ultimately comes down on the side of freedom ... No doubt there are oceans of rubbish on the internet, but how reliable is the mainstream media? ... The marketplace of ideas might actually work, if we let it.
Joshua B. Freeman
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalUltimately, Mr. Freeman can’t decide whether industrialism represents progress or dystopia, and that ambivalence reflects his clear eyes and fair-mindedness. He often lets workers speak for themselves, and they don’t always agree ... Mr. Freeman reminds us that, benevolent or tyrannical, the factory was an exponential leap in the human experience. And anyway, he concludes, 'we seem to be stuck with it.'
Claire Harman
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIn this powerful biography, Claire Harman shows that Charlotte Brontë was probably the first novelist to speak for bottom dogs everywhere...Ms. Harman has an impressive record in literary biography ( Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Burney, Sylvia Townsend Warner), and this one reveals the wonderfully mutinous side of Charlotte Brontë. But the tone of the book seems too placid and polite for such a stormy woman. There is much attention to domestic detail (exactly how carnivorous was Charlotte?) when there should be more penetrating literary analysis.
