PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewOne of the salutary features of this book is Zimmerman’s use of quoted speech, all of it sourced from memoirs and newspaper reports, so the human voice is heard often and to good effect ... Much as I enjoyed the book, I must take issue with the publisher’s description of it as \'brilliantly written.\' We regularly find such locutions as, \'three days of schlepping across the countryside\' and \'Musso went ballistic.\' The serious subject deserves more felicitous language. Zimmerman may not be a stylist, but he is a diligent researcher, and as a longtime resident of China, a shrewd observer of its politics.
Héctor Tobar
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a curious club sandwich of fact, fiction, speculation and ham, describing the wanderings and writings of a real person, Joe Sanderson, who is anything but a road bum. (Even if he were, he wouldn’t be the last, and his greatness is debatable.) But as a committed and self-conscious adventurer and romantic voyeur in search of the ragged and the rudimentary — a figure to whom I easily relate — he is absolutely of his time ... the author clearly knows the difference between fact and fiction, but the two forms are muddled here, and not helped by the intrusive footnotes ... Tobar — needlessly self-conscious about being a Hispanic author writing \'a novel about a man who isn’t\' — does a heroic job making sense of a two-decade stash of material and bringing this soldier of fortune to life, in all his maddening contradictions ... illustrates how such a wanderer is continually in search of the accidental, and how such laborious travel is transformative. It may not be a true novel or his full biography but it is certainly an eloquent epitaph.
