RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewFunder does a virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose ... Throw[s] light on the people Orwell failed to notice or fully understand — including, perhaps, himself.
Steven Pinker
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis book will attract some hammering itself: It contains something to upset almost everyone. When not attacking the populist right, Pinker lays into leftist intellectuals ... Pinker’s book is full of vigor and vim, and it sets out to inspire a similar energy in its readers ... Enlightenment Now strikes me as an excellent book, lucidly written, timely, rich in data and eloquent in its championing of a rational humanism that is — it turns out — really quite cool.
Laura Dassow Walls
RaveThe Guardian...[a] superb new biography ... Walls lets her sharpest observations slip through to the reader’s consciousness without touching the sides. The observations and interpretations are not hammered home, yet they are persuasive. She gives us a Thoreau who is more interesting, more intellectually curious and more subtle than I (for one) had given him credit for ... Wall’s biography allows Thoreau to breathe his own air on her pages, while turning her critical gaze on each of the public roles he played as political activist, mystic, tax refuser and environmentalist. In the end, they all come together in Thoreau the writer – the person who said: 'A man writing is the scribe of all nature – he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.'”
