PositiveThe NationThe primary culprit is both banal and all-encompassing—insurance ... Details...spill out from scene after scene of Born in Flames ... Ansfield has worked hard to herd the results of their prodigious research into line...wrangling a recondite and knotty tale ... Not all of this quite lands ... Ansfield’s energy tends to arise from the people of the Bronx and their experience of the burning years ... These stories put flesh on the bones of the arson rackets.
David Levering Lewis
PositiveThe Nation\"... rousing ... Thankfully, Lewis’s book allows readers to glimpse a more complicated and less predictable Willkie, an \'improbable\' figure whose ideas laid the foundation for a road not taken in American politics ... Lewis is well-placed to offer a fresh view of one of the 20th century’s more neglected figures. His dignified, agreeable, and sometimes ramshackle tome—reminiscent of its subject himself as it tumbles along in high spirits, throwing off insight and wisdom—reveals Willkie as a charismatic and iconoclastic champion of civil rights, free speech, and internationalism. And yet Lewis also underplays Willkie’s most important intervention, hailing him as Roosevelt’s partner in building an American-led \'new world order\' rather than seeing him for what he was: the largely forgotten but indispensable tribune of an alternative internationalism that did not seek to supplant Old World imperialism with its New World counterpart.\
