RaveAir MailTruth is not the point. The point was her image, consumed by a public who veered wildly from adoration to enmity, and created by a media that almost always opted for the latter ... Beller, writing into a world, and an America, at war with itself, is wiser than to lean on legend. She leans instead on grace, and forgiveness.
Adam Sisman
PositiveAir MailThis slim, enchanting, and exotically—in our era of lies—candid book is a kind of dividend to Sisman’s 2015 biography of the author. It contains the one aspect of the story that Sisman was forbidden from including in that book but which le Carré’s son Simon Cornwell allowed him to disclose following his father’s death, in 2020. The Secret Life of John le Carré is oddly unsalacious, though. Its contents are, for le Carré–lovers, less compelling as potential cause for condemnation than for the literary question they raise: How many of the romances were research?
Lisa Taddeo
RaveTIME... a battle cry too, and likewise a lullaby and a lyric deposition on that subject usually hovering right next to sex: desire. Madonna made you want to dance. Taddeo makes you want to feel ... The three women in the book happen to be straight, white and living above the poverty line. Despite this, Taddeo uses their experiences to raise many questions that aren’t, at least in the abstract, confined by sexual identity, ethnicity or socioeconomic status ... Taddeo never judges. She doesn’t slip into pseudopsychological frameworks for sex. She inhabits her subjects. And if you think her topic sounds a little louche, or isn’t quite your thing, the true magic of this book may lie less in the subject matter and more in the style. The illusion Taddeo creates is that there actually is no journalist at work here–no author, no thesis. She’s an apolitical messenger channeling her subjects’ potentially contentious perspectives. It’s the literary brilliance of the book that will knock you back–how she channels these women’s voices through her own ... For anyone who thinks they know what women want, this book is an alarm, and its volume is turned all the way up.
