PositiveBookForumUnwieldy ... G&W drag Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and Yuval Noah Harari to the woodshed for writing big dumb books about how society works that regurgitate fundamental errors about early human history ... Perhaps the most salutary lesson of this maddening, wonderful book, then, is that while there is no single answer to the question of how to secure human freedom, the question is one that humans have always asked and, presumably, always will.
Andreas Malm
MixedBookforumI regret to inform the reader that Andreas Malm’s new book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, does not in fact contain instructions on how to blow up a pipeline. The title is aspirational: how to get enough people to realize that (a) drastic measures are now required to prevent or ameliorate the worst effects of global warming, (b) the usual protests and appeals to institutional authority are getting nowhere, and therefore (c) direct action against the instruments and agents of climate disaster is justified ... Malm’s account of his time in climate camps and occupations occasionally succumbs to romanticism.[...] But much of the book is given over to dismantling ahistorical arguments for the climate movement’s commitment to nonviolence ... If Malm’s argument has a flaw, it rests in its reliance on the state ...
Lee Child
PositiveBookforumImplausible, sure ... We tell ourselves stories in order to tune the fuck out, sometimes ... It doesn’t matter that we’re not exactly dealing with John le Carré and George Smiley here. Child has a very particular set of skills. Skills he has acquired over a very long career. Skills that make him a nightmare for readers who have to get up in the morning ... Reacher may lack the self-questioning complexity of Smiley or the queasy nuance of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, but Child makes his simplicity a virtue ... Apparently two Childs are as good as one, as I wouldn’t have known The Sentinel was coauthored if it didn’t say so on the cover. As ever, the prose is utilitarian, no cream or sugar, like Reacher’s coffee. Words impart information. Sentences tell you what is happening ... Nothing fancy: that’s the way to write a good thriller ... Of course there are nits to pick ... Reacher is supposed to be a math whiz, but he believes that \'forty-eight hours\' is three words. The bad guys are awfully gullible this time around ... but I’ll be reading the twenty-sixth Jack Reacher novel.
Paul Muldoon
PositiveBook PostMuldoon’s the Busby Berkeley of contemporary poetry, his choruses opening and closing like elaborately staged flowers, floating kaleidoscopes of a (sometimes too) clinical precision. A poem in one book will rhyme with a poem in another book published a decade later. The rhymes themselves often out-Byron Byron ... Muldoon’s poems are propelled by association—sonic, metaphorical, historical, coincidental, sometimes private, but usually purposeful ... It’s all so, as the young folk say, extra. But that’s Muldoon in nuce, saints be praised ... I should note that I know Paul a bit, which mustn’t prevent my remarking that at times in Frolic and Detour the poet is merely noodling ... The fireworks and abstrusity get all the press; they’d be but fustian and frills without Muldoon’s animating vision. Over and over he wins you over ...Several of the poems wax indignant about Trump...but with liberal fire I find flickers only faintly...It’s the simpler pleasures that stick with me—the sonic frolic of \'steam-bent wild fig felloes fixed with willow pegs,\' the sense reached after a winding detour...
Tim Parks
MixedBookforum... a ramshackle tour of Manzotti’s theory, or at least of [Parks\'] attempts to understand it and explain it to other people ... is as much about what it’s like to be Tim Parks as about Manzotti’s spread mind. We learn of Parks’s abdominal pains, his sleep problems, his meditative techniques (these are related); his partner, Eleonora Gallitelli; his struggles with smartphones, tea urns, and the German language. He ambles, digresses, heads down the block for a pack of smokes, gets sidetracked in conversation, comes back hours later without the cigarettes ... His diaristic method prevents him from retroactively introducing Husserl into the earlier parts of the narrative ... There are so many misplaced modifiers that I began to wonder if Parks was doing it on purpose, and I wish Elon Musk were quoted zero times, but the flitting style’s fitting. Parks is moved to examine his own phenomenology as he tries to make the spread-mind theory match up with his experience ... Perhaps for this reason, he turns out to be adept at exposing the flummery of neuroscience.
Hilton Als
RaveThe Chicago TribuneProbably the least important thing worth saying about Hilton Als\' White Girls is that it\'s the best book of the year. I think it is, but these essays — hostile, intimate, whip-smart — brush aside such accolades ... The collection begins with 90 pages of meandering memoir that I slogged through with increasing boredom and frustration. It\'s hard to say so, given the essay\'s wrenching personal revelations, but the writing is sloppy (\'Upon moving in, our neighbors phoned the police\'), the tone sentimental, the structure haphazard, the whole a mess ... After that opening, though, the book turns on a thin dime ... Als isn\'t consistent in his deployment of the tropes of whiteness, but neither is America. The best essays here — on O\'Connor, lynching, Pryor, \'Gone With the Wind,\' Eminem, Michael Jackson — belong to that American critical tradition whose ambit is \'the complexity inherent in imagining what despair means to someone else and how that despair may shape arrogance,\' and the sad truth that being American has too often meant the exclusion of that complexity.
Richard Preston
MixedBookforum...[a] gripping and frequently excruciating story ... He provides vivid portraits of the brave medical personnel without whom the disease’s human cost would have been even higher ... Preston’s after the detail that snaps a person into focus, and he often finds it ... Preston also writes, for the most part, at the level of an airport thriller, which is fine when he’s writing airport thrillers ... It’s irksome in his nonfiction ... There are passages that seem drawn from a melodramatic press release[.]
Naomi Novik
RaveThe Chicago Tribune\"As befits a story with a climactic battle between an ice king and a demon tsar, Novik grounds her story in folklore and fairy tales, quicksilver allusions to Grimm and Andersen. But this fairy land is all too human, riven by misogyny and bigotry, poverty and oppression. Which is not to say Novik hectors — she has constructed a social whole whose contradictions feel lived in ... I shouldn’t neglect to praise the quiet flourishes of Novik’s prose.\
Elaine Pagels
MixedBookforum\"But Why Religion? is, as the subtitle has it, a personal story—you could call it a dark night of the soul. As harrowing as the opening chapter is... there is much worse to come. At the memoir’s core is an excruciating, unthinkable double tragedy ... Such needy heretics will find much to choose from in Why Religion? It is an uneven book, occasionally perfunctory, and it ends with a thud in Harvard Yard, where Pagels is receiving an honorary degree alongside Oprah Winfrey ... But it is a book entirely free of false comfort. There is no pious uplift in Pagels’s struggle with, and partial triumph over, grief and despair. There is just, sometimes, something she \'can only call grace.\'\
Megan Abbott
RaveThe Chicago Tribune\"Wryly is the only way cliches ever slip into Abbott’s prose. She can write up a storm, weaving spell after spell out of the jangle and dross of middle America, its Flying Js and Cinnabons, cherry slush and drag races under the viaduct. An affection for these details, an abhorrence of condescension, pulses through the novel, which is devastatingly canny about gender relations. It’s also as suspenseful as any best-seller you’d care to name, and as sad.\
David Graeber
PositiveThe Nation\"But despite a muddled sense of causes and effects, Graeber’s book offers us an engaging—albeit at the same time tremendously disheartening—portrait of labor in 21st-century capitalism ... In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber similarly employs anecdote in order to illustrate just how much insanity we take for granted. Liberally drawing from the respondents to his original essay, he recounts stories that read like Philip K. Dick at his least plausible. Some are sad, others infuriating, and many are both. A number verge on the absurd ... Despite Graeber’s focus on surface phenomena like hierarchy and envy, he is correct to conclude that the only thing keeping capitalism going is our refusal to stop it in its tracks through collective action.\
John Ashbery
RaveThe Chicago TribuneTaken on their own easygoing terms, his collages re-create childlike mysteries and enchantments. Their unlikely encounters can return me to my juvenile fascination with comic-book crossover events, Superman and Spider-Man duking it out in some corporate DMZ. Ashbery hasn’t forgotten Superman, either: The iconic cover of Action Comics #1 has been transplanted to a tropical beach beneath palm trees ... Of the poems included in They Knew What They Wanted, only some are \'collage poems,\' strictly speaking ... Many poems simply yoke together disparate elements, and some have no relation to collage at all ... But why look a gift Ashbery in the cotton-candy-coated kisser? My cartoonist friend wrote to me after discovering the poem \'The Songs We Know Best\' in this collection that he had ordered Ashbery’s volume A Wave. I can’t think of a happier endorsement.
George Saunders
RaveThe Chicago TribuneThe title story might be the best thing Saunders has ever written, and it's completely, heartbreakingly realistic. The fantastic enters naturally, as elements of a child's fantasy life … The new stories are seamless. The comedy of characters whose inner monologues discover them misusing words is naturalized when the monologues are those of children whose reading has given them vocabularies that outstrip their understanding … Saunders’ prose sings like {appropriately whimsical avian simile}. Saunders' ventriloquism often requires him to write pseudo-badly, and no else writes pseudo-badly so not-pseudo-beautifully.
Steve Erickson
RaveThe Chicago TribuneIt's the novel of now — this moment that just passed and the one just around the bend — the first novel of the Trump years, of tatterdemalion America, the starless stripes, as one of Erickson's chapter headings has it. A novel for 'a defiled century and whatever defiled world inhabits it' The Towers rise again, displaced, in a country riven by conflict, hostility, disputed territory, secession. It's the return of a history so repressed that it is all on the surface — a national imaginary so Towers-haunted, so Confederate-flagged, that tragedy must manifest physically as farce in order to reveal just how little anyone understands ... He gets compared ad nauseam to Thomas Pynchon, understandably...For all his magical-mystery-tourism, though, Erickson's not a wacky writer; he descends to Pynchon-level dad-jokiness only in Jesse's record review, where it works. And he's anything but gargantuan. He's a termite to Pynchon's white elephant, nibbling away at the map's edges instead of expanding them to cover the territory. This means he can get too mystical, trying to say more than his canvas will allow ... These are minor cavils. This is a novel we need, even if it's somewhat predictably moved by a ghostly patriotism that doesn't dampen rage so much as bewilder it. Even those readers for whom patriotism however bewildered was never an option might accept one rooted, as Erickson's is, in the resistance of the Sioux Nation at Wounded Knee ... he's written a battle hymn: 'No one believes in the same country anymore and probably never has.'
Gay Talese
MixedThe Chicago TribuneHow you feel about The Voyeur's Motel will depend in part on how much you value facts, since they are very much in question here ... Padded out to book length, The Voyeur's Motel is decidedly more plodding [than the New Yorker article], since a third of the page count is given over to the voyeur's journal ... With shades of Rear Window, Foos' follies would seem tailor-made for Talese, who remains, whatever his faults, a graceful writer. But this story, right up to its perfect final sentence, is somehow too small for him.
Lucia Berlin
RaveThe Chicago TribuneBerlin's terrific posthumous collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, makes the case that syntax is a way of noticing things, as sentence after sentence spins out in an unexpected but, it turns out, exactly right direction ... Berlin's characters are the scraped-raw, scraping-by types who populate every medium of American art, but they don't feel familiar. The mythos that drags down Denis Johnson's or Charles Bukowski's stories is sublimated here, turned back on itself. If there's something beautiful or romantic about Berlin's laundromats and crosstown buses, it's a surplus that no one in them can collect, and yet the stories are funny, warm, light-footed even when they break your heart ... As a writer, she's like the genius in the movies who stares at a huge blackboard crisscrossed with equations, scrawls a few characters, corrects a subscript, and solves the big problem that's stumped the best minds in the field.
Annie Dillard
PositiveThe Chicago TribuneThe Abundance's subtitle, Narrative Essays Old and New, got me all excited — new essays from Annie Dillard! Alas, the subtitle is a cruel lie. There are no new essays here — nothing previously unpublished, and the most recent essay appeared in Harper's Magazine 14 years ago ... But what is here is a distillation of a strange, powerful sensibility, unique in contemporary American letters.
Sonia Shah
PositiveThe Chicago Tribune...the power of Shah's account lies in her ability to track simultaneously the multiple dimensions of the public-health crises we are facing. If her analysis of the most important such dimension — the economic — is somewhat cursory, that is perhaps due to the sheer enormity of its scale.
Marilynne Robinson
PositiveChicago Tribune[T]o listen to Robinson's mind working in the prose rhythms she's spent a lifetime cultivating is a privilege no matter her theme.
