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Recent Reviews
Rachel Slade
Positive The Washington Post Persuasive ... Slade’s book gives a granular sense of just how hard it is for business owners, particularly those in manufacturing, to do the right thing by their workers in America today. It also conveys just how meaningful and rewarding building a truly ethical business can be ... Though the narrative wanders too often into digressions — like a numbered list of the 13 steps in just one phase of the construction of a hoodie — its broader political resonance is potent and timely.
David Leonhardt
Positive The Washington Post Ambitious ... A chronicle of almost a century of American economic life, rich with historical details and resonant narratives. It also makes a subtle but pointed argument about the present, offering a diagnosis of our current maladies and suggestions about the shape solutions could take ... Some of the most fascinating material in the book endorses a more nuanced interpretation of America’s political realignment in the 1960s ... His examination of the politics and economics of immigration is also fascinating ... Despite its overall strength, the book has some odd omissions and unexamined assumptions ... Barring the discovery of truly miraculous sources of clean energy — and unlimited supplies of the minerals and materials used to manufacture the stuff we consume — an environmentally sustainable American Dream in this and future centuries may need to look quite different from the ways it has until now.
Douglas Rushkoff
Mixed The Washington Post The Insulation Equation is a provocative and illuminating concept, and Rushkoff devotes much of the book to tracing the manifestations and origins of a mind-set that seduces people into believing they can insulate themselves from harms they help create ... Rushkoff provides a powerful critique of the attitudes and technologies that enable these deceptions. His arguments about their ultimate origins and his suggestions for how to improve our economy and future, however, are not persuasive ... The trouble starts with a confused and simplistic attack on empirical science and quantifications. Attempting to recast the terms \'Western\' and \'empirical\' as insults, he rails against a \'Western, empirical approach to science that breaks everything down into parts rather than emphasizing the connections and interactions between all these things.\' This is a cartoonish portrait; many ecologists, biologists and other scientists study interactions both within and between complex systems. It’s a shame that the book stoops to such ill-considered broadsides ... Rushkoff’s proposed solutions, rehearsed in a rapid paragraph near the end of the book, focus on consuming less and regulating and taxing industries more. These are good if familiar ideas, but they cannot be implemented well without careful empirical study. How much less do we need to consume, and in what sectors of the economy, and over what time frame? What is the comparative efficacy of different potential regulations, and what green technologies are most promising? ... These sorts of questions should not be answered by scientists alone; they also have moral and political dimensions. But they are impossible to answer without careful scientific analysis. Science is necessary to creating a livable future. It’s just not sufficient.
Matthew Stewart
Rave Washington Post Brilliant ... Compelling ... Stewart is both cartographer and critic, serving as a kind of appalled anthropologist as he reveals the self-justifying delusions and harmful customs that define the demographic ... Each chapter in the book examines the behavior and beliefs of the 9.9 percent in a specific domain — fitness, merit, housing, parenting, gender, education, real estate, race, etc. Many of these chapters are extraordinary investigations in their own right, dense with empirical detail and insightful analysis, and they collectively establish beyond any reasonable doubt the book’s fundamental claim ... The political and moral arguments for decreasing inequality through public spending on public goods are as old as America ... Stewart’s book is a worthy contribution to this long tradition, and his arguments deserve the widest possible audience ... What gives the book its relentlessly sharp edge is his exposure of so much conventional wisdom as ultimately self-serving and deluded.
Steven Pinker
Positive The Washington Post ... offers a pragmatic dose of measured optimism, presenting rationality as a fragile but achievable ideal in personal and civic life ... Given our current moment of apparent national derangement, when large areas of culture and politics seem to have slipped all tethers to reality, Pinker’s ambition to illuminate such a crucial topic offers the welcome prospect of a return to sanity. And in many ways he succeeds — as with all of his books, this one is erudite, lucid, funny and dense with fascinating material. His characteristic brew of Yiddish jokes, brainy comics and incisive argumentation is a pleasure to read, even when the subjects are technical and mathematical. It’s no small achievement to make formal logic, game theory, statistics and Bayesian reasoning delightful topics full of charm and relevance ... It’s also plausible to believe that a wider application of the rational tools he analyzes would improve the world in important ways. His primer on statistics and scientific uncertainty is particularly timely and should be required reading before consuming any news about the pandemic ... The role of moral and ethical education in promoting rational behavior is also underexplored.
David Rooney
Mixed The Washington Post ... an engaging miscellany of stories and details about timekeeping technologies spanning a huge range of cultures and periods ... Though the book aspires to engage grand themes of ethics, power and historical transformation, it rises only intermittently above the thickets of moderately interesting trivia to survey this broader landscape ... Much of this material is quite interesting, but the book’s frenetic pace can make it hard to catch more than occasional glimpses of meaning. In the space of just two pages, for instance, Rooney leaps from a tower clock in 14th-century Italy to a cannon fired at noon each day by the British in 19th-century Cape Town to a boom of clockmakers in Australia in the 19th century to clock towers in British India in the 1850s. When he does surface for a broader reflection, it’s banal ... Closer analysis of these individual circumstances, and a smaller set of examples more deeply considered, might have enabled more original conclusions ... But the details of his innumerable examples are often very intriguing ... With its hasty rushing between examples and themes, Rooney’s book itself feels calibrated to slot into the schedule of an overly busy reader snatching a few minutes at the end of an overstuffed day. One longs to wander with Hardy’s Tess down a dark, winding path, tracking the time only by the sun overhead.
Antonio Zadra
Positive The Washington Post Zadra and co-author Robert Stickgold’s fascinating new book, When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, steers a reasonable and broad-minded course between the many interpretive whirlpools that have swallowed previous explorers of dreams. Though they tour a broad range of contemporary research and theorizing, they ultimately propose that a primary function of dreaming is to detect and dramatize the possible meanings of information latent in memories and associations that we rarely access while awake ... Though Zadra and Stickgold reject the idea that dreams are random epiphenomena, they also stress that dreams only rarely replay or resolve actual life situations. Their own theory proposes that dreaming extracts new information from memories by discovering and strengthening previously unexplored associations ,,, The fact that dreams often generate powerful emotions and deploy narrative structures further strengthens the notion that they perhaps represent a kind of theater of the unconscious, one not always intent on providing concrete solutions so much as making sense and meaning out of our experiences.
Claudio Saunt
Rave The Washington Post Saunt’s book is a major achievement, commendable for his candor about the horrors of expulsion and his illumination of the crucial role that Southern slaveholders—eyeing Indian lands to take over for themselves—played in shaping early 19th-century American Indian policy. This alone would make for an important study, but he also manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries ... Saunt does not belabor current-day parallels, but they are impossible to miss.
Richard O. Prum
Rave The Washington Post Prum argues convincingly that the subjective experience of animals — the pleasure they take in aesthetic display — is a major evolutionary force. What is less clear and never really considered is whether animals are conscious of this pleasure and what it means when we say they experience beauty ... Prum is particularly eager to emphasize the role that female mating preferences may have played in human evolution, as if feminist arguments were simply waiting for the imprimatur of a biologist. While some of these conjectures are more plausible than others, the book is a major intellectual achievement that should hasten the adoption of a more expansive style of evolutionary explanation that Darwin himself would have appreciated.
Robert Wright
Mixed The Washington Post ...while he does not make a fully convincing case for some of his more grandiose claims about truth and freedom, his argument contains many interesting and illuminating points ... Wright’s enthusiasm for meditation is understandable. But his claims that meditation can help avert global catastrophes stemming from ethnic, religious, national and ideological conflict are less persuasive ... Perhaps the most basic problem with his argument is what it lacks: a vision of how to live a good and meaningful life. Quieting the raging clamor of perception, sensation and emotion may be a necessary condition for living a good life, but is it also sufficient? In short, once we’ve achieved some degree of tranquility through meditation or otherwise, how are we to live? By neglecting this question, Wright fails to consider the seductions of a dangerously permissive relativism and narcissism.
Elena Ferrante
Rave The Boston Globe Lila and Elena almost form a composite character, their disparate fates always entwined like two aspects of a single being. Each shares in the sorrows and achievements of the other … Reading Ferrante is an extraordinary experience. There’s a powerful and unsettling candor in her writing; Elena loves Lila, but she also acknowledges that on some level she wishes her friend would die. The narrator’s voice is familiar and confiding, but her gaze settles on every object with an unflinching objectivity.
Chris Hayes
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Hayes is a forceful and eloquent writer, and this book deserves close attention by a broad readership. He offers a clear and useful framework for understanding the current dysfunctions of American society. It’s a brilliant diagnosis, and the necessary treatments – more spending on social programs, the de-militarization of the police, gradual changes to the conscious attitudes and unconscious biases of millions of Americans – are more urgent than ever.
Daniel J. Sharfstein
Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...[a] magnificent and tragic new history ... Sharfstein is a wonderful storyteller with a deep knowledge of all the relevant source material from the period. His narrative is rich with fascinating historical details ... However vivid the material and well-structured the narrative, the story is inescapably tragic and often painful to read. It’s a powerful reminder that Americans live on lands stolen by force and without provocation. It’s also a tantalizing glimpse of a possible future that never materialized.
Christopher de Bellaigue
Mixed The Christian Science Monitor De Bellaigue is a knowledgeable guide through huge sweeps of cultural history. But his book gradually sinks under the weight of the many details that compose it. Focusing on a single complex and multiethnic culture over two centuries is ambitious enough; attempting to follow three such civilizations dissipates the narrative’s thematic clarity. Details proliferate, but meaning begins to recede. But the strongest sections of the book pose powerful dilemmas that are by no means resolved.
Jonathan Taplin
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...[an] excellent book ... Taplin makes a forceful and persuasive case that companies like Google and Facebook could employ their powerful artificial intelligence programs to prevent the infringement of existing copyright laws ... This is not a prophecy but a warning — without changes to legislation, corporate behavior and consumer values, the oligarchic dreams of a few billionaires could reshape the country even more than they already have.
Daniel C. Dennett
Positive The Washington Post Dennett writes with clarity and ease on neuroscience, chemistry, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, biology and much else. But this profusion of seemingly disparate material is not just a display of encyclopedic erudition. Elements within each of these fields are relevant to the two questions Dennett wants to answer: 'How come there are minds? And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question?' ... Considering its vast ambitions, Dennett’s book is a fascinating and provocative inquiry, a feat of intellectual synthesis in the tradition of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach ... The book has other flubs and flops. Dennett gets the etymology of the word 'ontology' wrong, and he has a frustrating inability to notice the achievements of female geniuses in the arts and sciences. (He musters a handful, then claims there are no others.) But the work as a whole is a delightful summation of Dennett’s distinguished ­half-century career pondering some of the hardest questions in science. It’s also a welcome reminder that philosophers, when they venture beyond the cloistered boundaries of scholarly disputes, can still make important contributions to some of the fundamental questions that motivated the birth of their discipline in the first place.
Jim Shepard
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Yet despite the seeming bleakness of the material, many of the stories are indeed very funny. Shepard avoids the trap of reducing the tragic to the monochromatic – even in the darkest of stories, humor, tedium, love, and the surreal co-mingle with the stark horror of annihilation by vast and pitiless forces ... The collection is an astonishingly powerful demonstration of fiction’s capacity to transport us across time and space. Much of this power derives from Shepard’s judicious use of historical research ... the collection is an absolute pleasure to read, and Shepard provides an eloquent example of the potential of historically informed short fiction.
J. M. Coetzee
Mixed The Chicago Tribune The story feels at points like a small raft sinking under the cargo of its own ponderous themes and allusions. There is a murder, a confession, a trial, a series of debates about the nature of crime and forgiveness. This is grand material, the stuff of the greatest Russian literature and the most powerful biblical narratives. But it feels intentionally diminished by the parched, etiolated quality of Coetzee's prose. However charged the subject matter, his language always retains a formal analytic distance ... Coetzee has channeled a host of influences in this novel: Saramago, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Plato, Ishiguro. The novel is strongest in its moments of gently comic surrealism — the spectators in a packed courtroom take a moment to calm themselves by closing their eyes, the man debates with the composer Juan Sebastian whether names are essentially arbitrary, a murdered duck has a funeral. The reaching for more profound registers remains strained, which may well be a deliberate dramatization of the failure of rationality to appreciate the full subtleties of art. Coetzee has become the dancer trying to explain the dance.
Stephen Kinzer
Positive The Christian Science Monitor ...an important and lucid analysis of what he rightly calls 'the mother of all debates' in the history of American foreign policy ... Kinzer is an incisive historian of American foreign policy, and he argues convincingly that America remains confused and divided over the relative merits of the two approaches to foreign intervention exemplified by this conflict. However eloquent the partisans of colonial overreach, however, the moral and historical facts converge on a single conclusion. In the words of Mark Twain, 'There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.'”
Ayelet Waldman
Pan The Chicago Tribune The story of how and why LSD and other psychedelics became stigmatized is one of the most interesting parts of Waldman's new book ... Waldman has an unfortunate tendency to complain about pseudo-problems and make strained attempts at humor. The woes of buying an expensive house in Berkeley, Calif., for instance, could have been omitted ... Waldman definitely succeeds in establishing that LSD and other psychedelics should be among the menu of pharmaceutical options available in America...[but] she never seriously considers the potential value of traveling other routes to the same destination ... She's also a bit too quick to blame outside factors for her dissatisfaction.
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Positive The Chicago Tribune These sorts of details are sufficiently weird and interesting that after adding some stories of his own observations on dives off the coast of Australia, Godfrey-Smith might have easily written a book that was just an extended marshaling of evidence for the claim that octopuses are strange and beautiful creatures. But his ambitions are larger ... Godfrey-Smith skillfully links the details of evolutionary history and biology to broader philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness ... a valuable contribution to some of the most basic questions about the origins of conscious life.
Greg Mitchell
Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...[a] fascinating and deeply researched book ... Mitchell’s history is based on a rich set of records, documents, and interviews. Some of the participants are still alive, and much other fantastic source material has been preserved ... Mitchell’s book provides a welcome reminder of the ingenuity and courage that people can display when politics and walls separate them from loved ones and a better life. But it’s also a testament to just how forcefully even ostensibly liberal administrations can suppress the media.
Alex Beam
Mixed The Christian Science Monitor Within the large category of books that should have been magazine articles, Alex Beam’s The Feud is one of the more enjoyable ... Beam is a deft and droll narrator of all the sordid details, and he does capture the folly and vanity that characterize public literary feuds. But devoting an entire book to the subject, even a short one, feels voyeuristic and trivial. Some things are best forgotten.
Michael Lewis
Mixed The Chicago Tribune Half of the book is largely redundant; Kahneman himself wrote an excellent 2011 popular book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Lewis skillfully highlights the wide-reaching implications of some of these ideas, but much of what makes his new book original is his deep reporting on the personalities and biographies of the two psychologists ... Lewis' tone is often quite worshipful. In a presumably unintentional demonstration of the hindsight bias, he lingers on details and episodes from both men's past that seem to prefigure future greatness ... Lewis overstates both the intellectual significance of their research and its power to do good.
Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa
Positive The Christian Science Monitor ...a strange and delightful book ... While he defers to Ozawa on technical matters, [Murakami] describes music with rich and suggestive metaphors and images that capture something essential about the spirit of the music.
John Edgar Wideman
Pan The Boston Globe He discovers missing pages and suspicious inconsistencies in witness testimony, creating far more than a reasonable doubt that Louis Till may have been wrongfully executed. This is the major revelation of the book, and it is a powerful one. But Wideman buries his investigative work in a morass of distracting and irrelevant material. He initially wanted to write fiction about Emmett, and the traces of this first project are scattered throughout the book ... The impulse to combine genres and forms is admirable, but the book sinks beneath the sheer miscellaneous abundance of Wideman’s material.
Dan Slater
Pan The Christian Science Monitor Slater succeeds in documenting some grievous individual and systemic failures ... Slater makes only passing reference to the larger policy questions that his topic raises. He focuses instead on the human stories of those enmeshed in the criminal underworld that prohibition helps to create. These are sometimes vivid, but it would have strengthened his book to provide more substantive analysis on the politics, history, and economics of the American war on drugs ... Slater also makes painfully strained attempts to inhabit the point of view of his characters ... The largest issue, however, is that Slater seems to share his subjects’ romantic and glamorous view of violence.
Alice Arlen and Michael J. Arlen
Positive The Christian Science Monitor \"...a pleasantly rambling mixture of family chronicle, biography, and cultural history ... [the] prose is amiably meandering and conversational, each page a cascade of digressions and asides that are just as engaging as the main storyline itself. This biography moves Alicia Patterson’s legend beyond the realm of family lore and establishes her as a singular and inspiring figure in 20th-century American history.\
Colson Whitehead
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers ... The Underground Railroad has moments of poignancy and horror and bleak humor. Whitehead shows how the miseries of slavery extend far beyond physical punishment and forced labor, infecting and corrupting the smallest pleasures with fear and humiliation ... The novel is less successful in delineating distinct and psychologically plausible characters. The point of view sometimes swings jarringly between essayistic pronouncement and interior monologue, and Cora remains something of a cipher.
Adina Hoffman
Positive The Christian Science Monitor A composite of biography, architectural and political history, and reportage, Hoffman’s engaging book illustrates the intricate interplay between architecture, identity, and history in this ancient and troubled city ... The contrast between Jerusalem of the early 21st and early 20th centuries is striking, and it’s hard not to share Hoffman’s melancholy nostalgia for that vanished era.
Nancy Isenberg
Positive The Christian Science Monitor [Isenberg] argues that our society was riven by class conflict and anxiety at every stage of its long history, from the first English colonists to the political upheavals of the present. This claim isn’t necessarily controversial, but the depth and variety of evidence she marshals in its support shows how class connects in startling ways to landscape, heredity, government policy, and popular culture. The book is a carefully researched indictment of a particularly American species of hypocrisy, and it’s deeply relevant to the pathologies of contemporary America.
Bronwen Dickey
Rave The Christian Science Monitor ...a powerful and disturbing book that shows how the rise of the killer-pit bull narrative reflects many broader American anxieties and pathologies surrounding race, class, and poverty ... as Dickey’s careful analysis shows, there are good reasons to question the assumption that anyone who wants a pit bull must have dubious motives ... Dickey quotes racially charged comments by everyone from journalists to kennel club members to show that pit bulls are considered the dogs of choice for minorities, the disenfranchised, and the urban poor ... Dickey’s book is exhaustively and scrupulously researched – she spent seven years traversing the country and conducting hundreds of interviews, and she has unearthed fascinating archival and historical material on her subject. It’s a remarkable study of our capacities for cruelty and compassion toward dogs and other humans, and an eloquent argument for abandoning the fears and prejudices that have made pit bulls in particular the victims of mistreatment.
Joshua Kendall
Positive The Boston Globe Kendall is a smooth storyteller with a good instinct for vivid details and anecdotes. This alone suffices for pleasurable historical reading, but he also claims to do something more. In the prologue he declares that his book 'starts from the premise that character, as traditionally defined, both counts and is worth resuscitating as a critical variable in political analysis.' The sketches in the book certainly do reveal aspects of the characters of various presidents, but there’s little serious political or historical analysis. Ultimately this doesn’t really matter — it’s good enough to watch Teddy Roosevelt’s son bring a pony into the White House elevator or Jimmy Carter’s son smoke a joint on the White House roof.
Lesley M. M. Blume
Positive The Boston Globe Blume shows how ruthlessly Hemingway betrayed his mentors, skewered his friends in his fiction, and sought to advance his own career at all costs. A more apt title might have been Hemingway Behaves Badly ... The 1925 visit to Spain became, in Blume’s words, 'a Bacchanalian morass of sexual jealousy and gory spectacle.' Untangling the episode’s transformation into The Sun Also Rises forms the core of Blume’s engrossing narrative ... Blume describes Hemingway as the Picasso of literature, a dubious claim that suggests the quality of The Sun Also Rises excuses such behavior. But after learning the sordid back story of the book, it will be tempting for some to see it as a bitter memoir masquerading as fiction.
Nathaniel Philbrick
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Philbrick is both a meticulous historian and a captivating storyteller. The book has unforgettable novelistic details...But Valiant Ambition also contains much astute historical analysis and argument.
Julian Barnes
Pan The Chicago Tribune Despite its promise and subject matter, Barnes' novel is a disappointing mishmash of ponderous essayistic musings and standard biographical material on Shostakovich ... Barnes' novel remains so tied to its sources and eager to explain its own meaning that it shows precisely the sort of unambiguous simplicity that Shostakovich's music resists.
Lucia Berlin
Rave The Boston Globe [Berlin's stories] alternate between light and dark so seamlessly and suddenly that a certain emotion barely fades before you feel something abruptly different. The bleakness of some of her subjects — alcoholism, suicide, sickness — belies her wonderful gift for coaxing humor from the most improbable material. The comic moments, in turn, shade into deep poignancy. The result is a fictional world of wide-ranging impact, a powerful chiaroscuro that manages to encompass the full spectrum of human experience ... Berlin is not usually placed in the pantheon of short-story writers but deserves to be ranked alongside Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. She excels at pacing, structure, dialogue, characterization, description, and every other aspect of the form.
Richard Russo
Pan The Chicago Tribune Despite its promise and subject matter, Barnes' novel is a disappointing mishmash of ponderous essayistic musings and standard biographical material on Shostakovich ... Barnes' novel remains so tied to its sources and eager to explain its own meaning that it shows precisely the sort of unambiguous simplicity that Shostakovich's music resists.
Adam Hochschild
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Hochschild’s narrative complicates this picture, though he plainly shares his literary predecessors’ admiration for the Republican cause. Through judicious use of journals, letters, memoirs, contemporary newspaper coverage, and previous historical studies, Hochschild captures both the passionate, partisan views of particular combatants and the larger political currents that shaped their experiences. It’s a moving and useful investigation into the dangers and promises of idealism.
Rick Bass
Positive The Chicago Tribune It's a profoundly satisfying collection, a plunge into rich and varied lives and landscapes. His prose is charged with a lyrical intensity rare in American fiction. The beauty of his sentences recalls the stylistic finesse of McCarthy and Willa Cather, but he does more than just write prettily. Reading Rick Bass offers the deep pleasure of reinhabiting an older world, one that's not lost so much as latent and usually unnoticed.
Roger Crowley
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Crowley’s history benefits from the voluminous correspondence of powerful captains as well as the diaries of ordinary sailors. He uses this rich source material to imbue events now half a millennium distant with incredible dramatic immediacy.
Roberto Calasso
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Calasso’s reflections on publishing show the same deep erudition and critical acuity as his earlier books, which include brilliant, polymathic, and difficult-to-classify works on Greek mythology, Hindu mythology, Kafka, and Tiepolo, among others. And while it’s clear that his new book, unlike these earlier works, collects separate, shorter pieces linked to discrete occasions, Calasso is too intelligent to write a speech or an article without saying something important and interesting.
Christopher Hitchens
Mixed The Chicago Tribune It's an uneven but impressive assortment that showcases both the strengths and idiosyncrasies of Hitchens' work...Like Vidal, Hitchens is a master of the acerbic apercus. His contrarianism can be refreshing, though it sometimes feels calcified.
Roger Angell
Mixed The Christian Science Monitor The pieces in This Old Man range from literary criticism to baseball writing to first-person essays to light verse and personal correspondence. The collection suffers slightly from an editorial penchant for over-inclusion. Fewer comic haikus and personal letters would have made for a slimmer, more consistently engaging volume. But the best pieces are very good indeed.
Alistair Horne
Positive The Boston Globe Horne has a flair for wrenching detail. We see rats gnawing on soldiers’ open wounds, desperately dehydrated men in Manchuria sipping the blood from their own bodies, and sundry other horrors. But his moral purpose is never far from the surface. Rather than simply listing statistics, he makes the toll of arrogance and historical amnesia vivid through specific, harrowing stories.
Paul Kalanithi
Rave The Boston Globe Kalanithi, who died on March 9, 2015, at the age of 37, delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.
Jay Parini
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Parini gives subtle and balanced readings of Vidal’s vast and varied body of literary work. He also captures the sorts of poignantly vulnerable moments that Vidal usually did his best to conceal.
Colum McCann
Positive The Chicago Tribune The three short stories that conclude the collection are extraordinary; in the shorter fiction his prose becomes incandescent, charged with the economy and lyricism of poetry.
James Shapiro
Positive The Christian Science Monitor Shapiro shows precisely what social and cultural energies are and how they influence even – perhaps especially – the most extraordinary minds and hearts.
Stacy Schiff
Positive The Christian Science Monitor This is precisely what Schiff offers – a comprehensive illumination of an unsettling period of American history that continues to captivate our cultural imagination. Her book is a brilliant feat of research, and she organizes vast streams of often fragmentary historical data into a lively narrative that has an almost cinematic immediacy.
Elena Ferrante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein
Positive The Christian Science Monitor A large part of Ferrante’s genius is her capacity to show that the conflict her narrator articulates is a false dilemma: It’s possible to imitate the 'shapeless banality of things' within the confines of a taut, propulsive story.
Kathryn J. Edin and Luke Shaefer
Positive The Boston Globe Edin and Shaefer’s book is an important exposé on what they describe as 'a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists.'”