MixedThe Wall Street JournalIf Mr. Kaag’s chronicle in these later chapters is less cohesive than the earlier ones, it nevertheless maps out a general outline of 19th-century American history, with its violent conflict over slavery and the rise of corporate industrialism ... An examination of the family’s women or the servants who attended the clan almost certainly would have shown a different side of this family’s remarkable history.
David Waldstreicher
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIn the absence of personal detail, Mr. Waldstreicher... expertly re-creates the complex political realities of pre-Revolutionary America. He is especially good at parsing the subtle messages that Wheatley concealed in her verse, explosive devices meant to detonate the racial politics of her time.
William R. Cross
RaveWall Street Journal[Homer\'s] reticence would seem to pose a challenge for the biographer, but in William R. Cross’s new—and certain to be definitive—life of the artist, the gaps in the painter’s private history are filled in by detailed accounts of people he knew and places he visited ... He constructs a reliable narrative of the artist’s movements and residences, of his friendships and financial arrangements and, most important, of his shift from fluent magazine illustrator to painter of enigmatic depictions of nature and everyday life ... Mr. Cross captures much of the artist’s achievement in his fine biography. If Homer’s reserve leads him to speculate on unknowable aspects of the artist’s life—what he might have read, whether the lifelong bachelor fell in love—his interpretation of the artwork is first-rate ... William R. Cross has a special talent for discerning details most of us overlook, and he provides a rich commentary on Homer’s technique, his influences, and even occasional submerged biographical reference, which the painter rarely allowed himself to convey. The biographer’s close attention is worthy of his subject.
Robert A. Gross
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... easily the most comprehensive work ever written about the town’s social history during the transcendentalist era ... Mr. Gross’s historiography is patient, thorough, cumulative ... One of the most fascinating chapters in Mr. Gross’s account examines a number of young men and women of the village who fell under the spell of Emerson’s thought ... Mr. Gross’s richly detailed account shows us how such a surprising conjunction of place and thought could occur.
Robert S Levine
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... engrossing ... presents the battle over Reconstruction primarily from the perspectives of Johnson and Douglass, in the process illuminating what was at stake in the febrile political climate of the postwar period ... While the author expertly depicts Douglass—he has written about the great orator before—his portrait of Andrew Johnson stands out. In this book, Johnson is a vexing, divided and, for these reasons, ultimately intriguing person ... Mr. Levine is careful not to place the blame for the botched Reconstruction entirely at the 17th president’s feet ... Mr. Levine poignantly captures a moment when the future of the United States was up for grabs, when it was possible to imagine the full political participation of blacks and whites across the nation. In so doing, the author suggests the tragic consequences of failure and the way in which those consequences are still very much with us.
Michael Gorra
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... powerful ... Mr. Gorra demonstrates convincingly that this unshakable past for Faulkner came increasingly to involve race ... Mr. Gorra does not try to defend the indefensible. But he also refuses to reflexively \'cancel\' Faulkner—to jettison Faulkner from the American canon because of his attitudes. Instead, the critic offers a reason to continue reading the novelist that will strike readers as either generous or misguided ... If writing enabled Faulkner to become a better person, at least while writing, why did this process fail to affect the rest of his life? And to what extent should we make claims for literature as a transformative force in a world in which systemic injustice can continue unabated?
Tony Horwitz
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Horwitz’s journalistic approach is to remain open to experience and allow readers to form judgments for themselves. As in his previous works, his generosity of spirit enables him to strike up conversations with a broad cross section of Americans living and working below the Mason-Dixon Line ... it is the people Mr. Horwitz encounters that make his book a compelling report on the state of our present disunion. Speaking with a seemingly endless cast of perceptive, funny and welcoming Southerners, he debunks the preconceptions of his Northern neighbors who imagine \'deep-red Texas\' as little more than an \'arid, alien, and hostile\' territory ... Gradually a picture emerges of a region still wrestling with the aftereffects of slavery, the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction ... The Civil War continues to be fought, in Mr. Horwitz’s telling, over the relative status of white and black people.
Steven Ujifusa
MixedThe Wall Street JournalBefore the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the period of greatest technological innovation in the U.S. occurred during the first half of the 19th century. The railroad, the telegraph and the photograph conspired to shrink time and space in this era and, in the process, to knit together an increasingly far-flung people in the expanding nation. In Barons of the Sea, the nautical historian Steven Ujifusa chronicles another invention—the clipper ship—and the immense fortunes that both propelled and resulted from its development ... The book is almost a beginner’s manual in sailing and is infused by a clear love for the regal triple-masters of the past. But while it is filled with vivid portraits of the key players in America’s sailing dynasties, the focus on the ships themselves sometimes squeezes out more human stories. More attention could have been spent, for instance, on the remarkable Eleanor Creesy, whose knowledge of astronomy and oceanic currents rivaled those of her male peers. About the crews of the clippers we learn very little ... But these are small flaws. Mr. Ujifusa’s subject ultimately is a handful of vessels, as ephemeral as they were fast, that nonetheless produced fortunes still with us to this day.
Laura Dassow Walls
RaveThe Wall Street JournalIn her richly rewarding Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls rescues Thoreau from the caricatures that have adhered to him since his most famous work was published ... Ms. Walls convincingly shows that Thoreau’s journals are his second great masterpiece. Here Thoreau finally overcame the influence of Emerson to become a meticulous observer of natural phenomena ... If the Thoreau beyond Walden is an author for our time, then Laura Dassow Walls is his biographer.
John Kaag
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"Neither as nuanced nor as detailed as Louis Menand’s epic The Metaphysical Club (2001), Mr. Kaag’s book is ultimately less concerned with the historical context of pragmatism than it is with how that tradition might help us moderns survive and even thrive ... the bigger problem is that his passion for books shows how little connected he is to actual, living people...All this changes, however, with the arrival of Carol Hay, a feminist Kantian colleague who gradually pulls the narrator out of his depressive self-absorption and helps him to experience the world. Ms. Hay is a vivid presence in the book, a current of warmth in a sometimes chilly account of existential despair.\
Anne Boyd Rioux
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAnne Boyd Rioux’s well-researched and highly readable Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist offers a fresh reappraisal of Woolson’s life and writing, but it is only half successful in freeing its subject from James’s literary orbit.
T.J. Stiles
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe burden of T.J. Stiles’s epic, ambitious, bursting-at-the-seams biography, Custer’s Trials, is to show that for 30-some years preceding Little Bighorn, Custer (1839-76) was shaped by forces every bit as powerful and overwhelming as Sitting Bull’s army of warriors on that infamous summer day.
