PositiveThe Boston GlobeBurning Boy is thorough in its research, yet hurtles forward in its often intense, often moving enthusiasm for the subject. This is not a scholar’s biography. It is a fine novelist’s plunge into the life and mind of another artist. Auster continually makes it clear that Crane’s art matters to him and his own work, and has something vivid and authentic, something vital to offer our current fraught moment, a moment marked by too much evasion of reality, and not nearly enough compassion.
