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Recent Reviews
Michael D'Antonio and Peter Eisner
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books \"Eisner and D’Antonio do an aggressive, careful job of reporting Pence’s record. This relatively short book is crammed with details of Pence’s political history, though readers will have to look hard for anything that shows their subject in a flattering light ... [Eisner and D’Antonio] go too far in confusing Pence’s hypocrisy and apparent moral blindness with the actual tenets of the faith he espouses ... That said, the authors’ apparent bias against Pence’s faith takes nothing away from their rich — and troubling — depiction of his political history, his character, and his role thus far in the Trump administration... There’s more than enough solid information in The Shadow President to give any thinking American pause at the idea of a Pence presidency.\
Michael Downs
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books \"Michael Downs spins the sad facts of Wells’s life into a gloomy, hypnotic story in his debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist ... the power of Downs’s storytelling lies in giving us glimpses of the man Horace might have been if pain, \'that slippery thing,\' hadn’t cast a spell on his soul ... In any case, Downs tells a fascinating story in skilled, often elegant prose, and he treats all his characters with great sympathy.\
Roxane Gay
Positive The Nashville Scene The book explores, frankly and in detail, what it’s like to live in a body the world feels entitled to judge. In a culture that relentlessly shames fat people, it’s an act of courage for anyone Gay’s size simply to write honestly and without apology about her physical existence. But she goes much further here, confronting the traumatic roots of her condition and revealing her ongoing struggle to make some kind of peace with her body and with her own emotional and physical hunger … The primary struggle in Hunger is the one within Gay herself. She describes a continual tension between her desire to inhabit a smaller, healthier body and her desire to remain protected by the ‘fortress’ of her fat … As an account of human strength and creativity defying cruelty and pain, Hunger is a hopeful, even inspiring book.
Barry Friedman
Positive The Nashville Scene For a book directed to general readers, Unwarranted goes fairly deeply into legal intricacies, but Friedman’s prose is crystal clear and conversational in tone. Case examples give the book its narrative meat, and some of them are doozies ... Friedman’s purpose in Unwarranted isn’t simply to spur public awareness or to argue that the courts ought to take a tougher line in protecting our rights. On the contrary, he thinks we’ve relied far too much on the idea that the courts are our natural guardians against abusive law enforcement. That’s the people’s job in a democracy, he argues, and the people have let the job slide for too long.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Nashville Scene [Strout] takes readers into the mind and heart of a woman who has survived poverty and abuse, revealing a spirit that is both beautiful and deeply wounded. This intense first-person novel has little in common with Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, Olive Kitteridge, but that book's legion of fans will find in Lucy Barton a character as unique and fascinating as the formidable Olive.