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Recent Reviews
Connie Chung
Rave The New York Times Book Review Entertaining and revealing ... Chung writes breezily and with irreverent humor about the scoops, the internal politics and the pure hustle that eventually got her to the top ... Persuasive.
Chelsea Manning
Rave The New York Times Book Review README.txt describes in painful, affecting detail what happened as a result of the U.S. Army intelligence analyst’s decision in 2010 ... Manning intends this memoir to explain and to instruct ... Though many of the facts here were previously known through extensive news reporting over more than a decade, Manning’s memoir fills in some blanks and, most important, adds a searing personal element. The writing in README.txt is vivid ... Although Manning’s tale is troubling to read, it manages to be uplifting as well. In addition to describing the abuse she was so often subjected to, she writes of small but touching acts of kindness ... Her sense of accomplishment in becoming her true self gives the memoir something of a redemptive ending.
Joe Hagan
Positive The Washington Post \"Although he is sometimes tough on Wenner, Hagan is more than fair. Ultimately, he seems to agree with former Rolling Stone editor Will Dana that Wenner, though torn between the virtues and vices of his generation, is \'51 percent good\' ... Hagan, to his credit, approached the book not as a rose-tinted \'authorized biography\' but as a serious work of narrative journalism. As such, it largely succeeds, wending its way through the decades, the music and the personalities ... Hagan not only helps us understand how terribly much it seemed to matter, once upon a time. He also, through his nuanced portrait of Wenner, shows us how thoroughly the publication reflected its founder, warts and all.\
Joan Didion
Positive The Washington Post A few of the more polished passages bring to mind what Didion could do at her height — the literary journalism from El Salvador, the defining pieces about California’s culture of ennui ... At times, the notes are merely disconnected impressions. In one regrettable case, a harangue by a good ol’ boy is presented verbatim for pages. Still, salvation keeps arriving: Sentences — with their detached, reportorial tone, their economy of words, and piercing observations — that are vintage Didion ... These excerpts, of course, cannot approach Didion’s two great nonfiction collections, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or her screenplay for The Panic in Needle Park, or her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking ... But these excerpts have value. They give us a renewed sense of the writer, now 82, in her creative prime. And, often enough, they remind us of her brilliance as a stylist, social commentator and observer...there is every reason to be grateful that Didion heeded her own advice, and wrote it all down.