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Luis Alberto Urrea
Positive The New York Times Book Review Urrea writes about death with a sort of familiarity, a suspension of judgment that highlights the absurdity inherent in extreme violence ... Irene’s perspective dominates the novel, but Urrea frequently slips into Dorothy’s head, and sometimes uses an omniscient narrator to foreshadow events of which Irene and Dorothy are unaware. When he returns to Irene, it’s as if his naturally fluid voice is forcing itself into a limited third-person straitjacket ... Urrea has a weakness for melodramatic imagery ... The novel is much stronger where it homes in on Irene’s experience.
Frank Wilczek
Rave The New York Times Book Review Whether or not you’re accustomed to reading physics for pleasure, the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s Fundamentals might be the perfect book for the winter of this plague year ... Wilczek writes with breathtaking economy and clarity, and his pleasure in his subject is palpable ... What a reader gets in Fundamentals is the native language of physics — mathematics — precisely translated by someone who has spent a lifetime (about a billion thoughts!) on these forces that shape our physical world. Beyond the facts, Fundamentals is full of the kind of heady ideas that keep laypeople reading about contemporary physics ... [Wilczek] explains that in physics, when a model becomes too complicated, an alternative model can help answer important questions. Fundamentals offers readers just that sort of radical shift: the way that energy, seen from another angle, is a particle; the way that space-time could be a form of matter; the way that stepping outside a catastrophe to look at it on a cosmic scale might actually be the first step toward a solution.
Yaa Gyasi
Rave The New York Times Book Review Gyasi’s style here is especially striking ... Some readers of Transcendent Kingdom may miss the romantic sweep of that novel and the momentum Gyasi achieved by leaping a generation and a continent every few chapters. If Homegoing progressed in more or less linear fashion, in this book narrative time is more relative ... the picture of mental illness in Transcendent Kingdom is darker and more nuanced ... Transcendent Kingdom trades the blazing brilliance of Homegoing for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name.