MixedThe New York Journal of BooksMany of the essays in Essays One are dry instruction ... very intelligent but dry; more instructional than inspirational. There may be a few frissons of bright imagination that escaped from Davis’ fiction into this collection, but not many, and for the reader, not enough. This reviewer holds to the firm conviction that imagination is like fairy dust. Remove the fairy, and what remains is dust ... The best part of Essays One are the many poets and authors Davis considers influences, these will be useful for Davis’ admirers to pull out from Essays One and dig in to on their own.
John Johnson Jr.
MixedThe New York Journal of BooksJohnson Jr. tells the fascinating life story of the imaginative and abrasive astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, providing historical context and also biographies of colleagues and combatants (often one and the same) ... Johnson provides short biographies of the famous astrophysicists working at that time, so the readers get a feel for Zwicky’s peers ... Johnson Jr’s writing is in the vein of popular science, so he will have a more appreciative audience in those in search of a good story rather than of the details of scientific discovery. Here though, Johnson perhaps overdoes the \'popular\' part of popular science. He avoids not just math and physics, but also the type of explanation that is necessary when one avoids math and physics—the greatest depth in science Johnson feels comfortable with is an explanation of the Doppler Effect ... As for narrative, Johnson has a tendency to jump back and forth over many years within chapters, and often back and forth over many years across paragraphs. Though the intent may be to explain Zwicky’s arc of personal contradictions, and the long-term consequences of events across time, jumping time makes it more difficult for a reader to maintain a sense of when is now in the narrative. Another, though a relatively minor issue, is that not all of Zwicky’s life is interesting, or told in an interesting manner, and some of the looser parts should have been tightened, or expanded with greater detail, or even removed, which could be done without harming the storyline.
Charles Fishman
PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksFishman is a really, really good storyteller, and One Giant Leap would make a fantastic audio book ... Fishman picks and chooses among the pieces of spacecraft that were part of Apollo’s success, though the focus is, for the most part, on the parts having major technological and political impact, the Lunar Module (LM), the Apollo Guidance computer (AGC), the Lunar rover, but also the politics that went into planting an American flag on the moon ... even at 480 pages, One Giant Leap could and should have been even longer, with more on the Mercury and Gemini missions preceding Apollo, more on the Saturn V, more on each Apollo astronaut, and more on their discoveries.
Sergio De La Pava
PanNew York Journal of Books\"Sergio De La Pava’s Lost Empress begins with all the right things, interesting plot, smart dialogue, and punning wordplay but sadly, like a child’s letting go of an untied balloon, Lost Empress soon runs out of energy and falls ... Lost Empress is not satisfying for a number of important reasons: Though the premise and opening chapters do provide an entertaining explosion of wackiness and wordplay, the story and characters run out of steam, and the story essentially dulls and drags. There are a number of long and awkward sentences that break the story flow. There are too many football, criminal law, and medical references that cause the reader to pause and look up phrases that are essential to the context of the story, which again breaks the story flow. One could imagine a writer doing this for football, or law, or medicine but all three? ... This reviewer wanted to like Lost Empress, and did, but only the early chapters.\
