RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe clarity and energy of his writing never fail. Nor is the reader ever left wondering about the relevance of Menand\'s side trips into theory and anecdote ... As good as Menand\'s portraits of the major figures are, the reader may find that some of the lesser characters in Menand\'s history linger even more in the mind ... The Metaphysical Club sets a new standard for anyone who would write, or read, the human story of a progress of ideas.
Martha C. Nussbaum
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleHer latest book...figures as a kind of case study, exceptionally topical and plainly written, applying some of what she has understood to a singularly distressed moment of America’s common culture ... the book unspools elaborate arguments readably ... The reader comes away from The Monarchy of Fear relieved by having heard so many unsavory and puzzling phenomena of our moment accounted for, yet a little disheartened by Nussbaum’s concluding nostrums. She counsels hope—tinged in many minds by disappointment in the Obama presidency—as the antidote to consuming fear. Here I disagree: relaxation, no less difficult to achieve, is the opposite and anodyne to panic and fear ... That the exemplars she cites—Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela—were moral geniuses makes liberation from the monarchy of fear seem noble and desirable but also inimitable, all but unattainable.
Paul Kingsnorth
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleNo synopsis can convey the strangeness of Buckmaster’s experiences, which Kingsnorth voices in tones and moods that shift from prideful, bitter reminiscence to nature ecstasy to remorse, spiraling self-doubt and delusion ... Beast is a cautionary fable for everyone who might hope to evade our current historical impasse by sheer bad faith or by extremes of primitivism, self-seeking or abstraction. It leads readers away from optimism and realism alike, deeper into a new scrutiny of the stories by which we try to make our way.
