PositiveThe New York Review of BooksPinckney is nuanced, historically minded and subtle – qualities that have allowed him to skirt the trapdoors of neoconservatism on the right and Marxism and black nationalism on the left. His work is imbued with an appealing, unadvertised bookishness, the result of wide and greedy reading. By and large, his sentences are smooth and readable, but sometimes they can be opaque and leaden ... Busted in New York shows him to be not only a formidable essayist, but a deft reporter as well. The reportage is edgy and idiosyncratic; it gazes outward but looks inward; it is heavily autobiographical; now and then, its time sequences unfold in jarring and surprising ways. The most impressive examples of the formula are a trio of reports from New Orleans, New York and Ferguson, Missouri ... Busted in New York ends with a celebratory essay on Aretha Franklin, but it can’t disguise the melancholy within these pages. Unresolved skirmishes with deceased parents permeate the text, and darken it: the existential ambiguities of the expatriate life (the author has lived in Berlin and Oxfordshire), and the hazards of the artistic vocation.
Seymour M. Hersh
MixedThe New York Review of BooksAt its best, Reporter is a lively self-portrait of a maverick and troublemaker. But it is scrubbed and sanitized. [Hersh] appears in a half-light; the book does not illuminate the darkest corners of his long career ... Hersh is less than truthful ... For a full view of Hersh and an authoritative sense of his career, which embodies the expansive possibilities of muckraking as well as its many perils, one must look elsewhere ... A merit of Reporter is the way in which it divulges Hersh’s trade secrets ... What is Hersh’s underlying philosophy and motivation? On this question, Reporter, which is written in chatty, hurried, self-satisfied prose, is not very introspective or revealing ... The vitality in Reporter fades as the Reagan years approach ... one wishes that Hersh had spent more time adding texture, nuance, and humility to Reporter. If he had scrutinized his own life with the same tenacity he has directed elsewhere, he might have given us one of the great journalistic memoirs.
