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Recent Reviews
John Kaag
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"At 37, confronting the dullness of adult life, philosopher John Kaag looks for inspiration in the life and writing of one of the heroes of his youth, Friedrich Nietzsche ... The summer before his senior year of college, Kaag traveled to Basel, where Nietzsche had been a professor, and from there retraced Nietzsche’s escape into the Alps. When he arrived in Sils-Maria, Kaag stayed in the Nietzsche-Haus, where Nietzsche had lived for years and wrote some of his best-known books, and began slipping into an inspired madness. Sleep-deprived and starving, the young Kaag stood over a chasm and contemplated leaping. He would survive his 20s and 30s in part by shifting his attention to more tempered philosophers. But when his daughter asks about the frostbite scars the Alps left on Kaag’s ear, his wife suggests he revisit Nietzsche ... But while the book serves as an entry point to Nietzsche’s writing, its real success is as an embodiment of one of his core ideas — and one that you needn’t have read his works to appreciate: the imperative of becoming who you are. Kaag takes this challenge seriously and makes a sincere go at meeting it. \
Raymond Arsenault
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune ...less a biography of a tennis player than a biography of a man who happened to play tennis. Ashe himself would have had it no other way ... Ashe was always aware of his status as a trailblazer in the white world of tennis, an awareness that helped inform the dignity with which he famously carried himself as a player and as an outspoken black activist and public intellectual. Arsenault renders this aspect of the story exquisitely, moving smoothly between tennis and politics and Ashe’s ongoing efforts to determine and articulate his positions with respect to the important issues of his time ... if there’s one shortcoming to the book it’s a lack of feel for Ashe’s game. Arsenault spends little time on Ashe’s style of play or giving a sense of how Ashe got to be as good as he did ... Arsenault’s readers will find instead a rare perspective on a professional athlete in which the sport does not make the man.
Leslie Jamison
Rave The StarTribune \"Most writers would struggle with this kind of book to keep the momentum for 400-plus pages, but the approach suits Jamison, who is at her best when thinking out loud. But her strength is inseparable from her vulnerability ... By turning her attention outward to the stories of others, Jamison understands her own experience in a context larger than the prism of self. The Recovering demonstrates what memoir has always assumed: that in the stories of others we find ourselves. It is a magnificent achievement.\
A.J. Jacobs
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Despite having no event-planning experience, Jacobs imagines he can set a world record for the largest family reunion. And so begins a sequence of successes and misadventures that Jacobs recounts in 46 breezy chapters … For all the fun Jacobs has in his excursions into his family’s ancestry, Mormon genealogical archives, DNA testing, the evolution of our species and dozens of other related topics, his project is a serious one. At a time when racial essentialism is finding favor across the political spectrum, It’s All Relative offers the timely reminder that we are all a blended family.\
Joan Didion
Rave The Minneapolis Star It might sound like a volume best left to scholars and completists, except that Didion’s notes are not like most writers’ notes. The form suits her particular brilliance: the ability to sequence arresting sentences, crammed with observation and insight, and let them generate their own momentum. Her best work is often elliptical and free-floating. South and West gets us, if anything, even more swiftly to one point after another. And from one improbable image to the next: Didion falling in the mud; Didion keeping a Confederate flag in her linen closet ... If this is how Didion’s notebooks read, let’s have them all.
Jon Krakauer
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Perhaps the scariest thing about Missoula is how utterly average is the town it describes. Krakauer uses Missoula as a case study for the wider phenomenon of silencing rape victims: The vast majority of rapes are not reported; the vast majority of rapists are not punished ... [Krakauer's] trustworthiness has never been more important than with this book, which critics will have a hard time dismissing.