RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable ... Klein’s fans will recognize her method from her prior books ... Her strategy is to take a scourge ... trace its origins, then chart a course of liberation. In each book she arrives at some semihopeful place, where activists are reaffirming embattled civic values ... To call This Changes Everything environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda ... The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve a choral force ... To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet This Changes Everything is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring.
Dinaw Mengestu
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is about the animate presence of loss, about a man struggling to find traction in his ostensibly current life as proprietor of an ailing Logan Circle grocery store. Almost every page reminds us that \'departure\' and \'arrival\' are deceptively decisive words ... The deeply felt pain in Mengestu’s novel is offset by the solace of friendship — whether it’s a friendship that hovers on the verge of romance, a friendship between an adult and a child or, above all, the friendships that steady the daily lives of fellow immigrants ... Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia ... It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance ... A great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.
Jim Crace
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewFor the setting of Harvest, [Crace] has chosen an uncertain century — in both senses of that phrase. Crace’s narrator, Walter Thirsk, inhabits an agrarian community, a village that time seems to have forgotten, sealed against the wider world. Sealed, that is, until the novel’s opening scenes, when covetous, irruptive forces begin to smash through those barriers … Crace writes with a particular, haunting empathy for the displaced. Indeed, displacement doubles as his theme and as his storytelling strategy. By transposing contemporary anxieties onto distant times he allows us to feel them afresh. To say as much is not to pigeonhole him as an abstract or formulaic writer: his plots may be epic, but his sentences carry a sensual charge.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
PositiveThe New York TimesAt once historical and eerily current, Half of a Yellow Sun honors the memory of a war largely forgotten outside Nigeria, except as a synonym for famine. But although she uses history to gain leverage on the present, Adichie is a storyteller, not a crusader … Whenever she touches on her favorite themes — loyalty and betrayal — her prose thrums with life. Like Nadine Gordimer, she likes to position her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide. Both Half of a Yellow Sun and Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. And both novels shrewdly observe the women — the wives, the daughters — left dangling over that chasm.
