PanThe Financial TimesKingsolver keenly explores the links between big historical events and individual lives, and at its best, as in The Poisonwood Bible, her writing moves easily between the two … Every detail of every decade is faithfully chronicled and recorded, rather than evoked...The result is a relentless pop-cultural history lesson … Curiously, despite his time in Mexico with famous communists, we get little sense of his own politics, nor any real emotional response concerning his closet homosexuality … We do not get under the skin of history. The intention is admirable but the politics are naïve. Everything is black and white.
