PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksA summation of that terrifying period but also, to some extent, of a long, groundbreaking career ... The metaphors can become heavy-handed ... This is Rushdie on a smaller, more intimate scale than we’ve seen before. But compressed in this slim book, his perennial big claims resonate with even more force.
Scott Anderson
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAnderson offers vivid on-the-ground accounts of the CIA’s infancy and growth, particularly in Berlin ... If the point is to illustrate the human architecture of the Cold War’s beginnings, however, the book doesn’t leave us with an indelible profile of these men. They may be the manifestations of the changing, more secretive nature of executive power in Washington, but not all of all these characters carry the weight of events over the course of the book ... notwithstanding some good insights and the author’s flair for storytelling, the book has few major revelations, either historic or psychological. Nor is it quite the reckoning with US decision-making that it purports to be. Even as he explores some of the political and financial incentives in Washington to keep conflicts burning, what Anderson doesn’t confront is the expansionism at the heart of US foreign policy, present long before the Iron Curtain came down in Europe ... This is not to say that Anderson should have aligned himself with those who reduce American motives to oil. But what is missing here is a candid acknowledgment that the United States, taking its cue from Britain and believing Mossadegh too unstable, took it upon itself to shape or dictate the political order of a much weaker state, in a region vital to US economic interests.
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn sum, the book presents a quirky but ultimately lovable—and widely loved—man ... his persona is so endearing, so enamored of life and film, so—indeed—normal, that it’s confounding to think that behind this childlike chirpiness is the mind that gave us the ear and the depraved Frank Booth who severed it ... It is indeed captivating to read both McKenna and Lynch on the origin of his stories. Many like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and 1990’s Wild at Heart (based on a Barry Gifford novel), do have a basic plot, but their artistic merit is in their accumulation of effects and moments ... Lynch’s prose has all the innocence of the deceptive first part of a Lynch movie ... His writing is sprayed with \'sort ofs\' and \'kind ofs\' and \'so cools.\' The hard work required to get Eraserhead into Cannes \'almost killed me\' ... There is, however, a problem with this kind of charm. It’s ultimately a performance, not in the sense that it’s inauthentic, but because it’s the voice of a raconteur; there’s something inevitably impersonal about it. Lynch doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a one-on-one with him, but instead like you’re one among several sitting on barstools around him ... McKenna ends up not being too big a help here. While she understands her subject well, she’s also too close to him ... If we don’t get enough of Lynch’s warts, at least we get to see him and the people around him playing with that clay.
Kevin Powers
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksPowers is good at writing war ... The intelligence in the new novel, however, is suffocating. Powers skips perspectives from character to character to an omniscient narrator who knows things the characters don’t, without getting too close to any one figure. Cameo players, even a postman we never see again, are offered a hearing. A panorama of voices in itself isn’t a problem, but Powers never strikes a comfortable balance, in particular between the omniscient and the personal. The result is that we’re often unsure of the origins of an observation. This matters ... It’s difficult to tell if simplicity is parading as complexity at the bidding of a character, in which case it might be forgivable, or of the author, in which case it’s not.
Matt Taibbi
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn I Can’t Breathe, Taibbi titles almost all of his chapters after an individual whose experience prompts a wider discussion about the Garner story and the black experience with the American justice system ... Throughout, Taibbi writes evocative scenes of police subjecting young black men to physical, sexual, and psychological humiliation. By curbing his customary Rolling Stone chutzpah, he gives these characters and events room to reveal their drama and get the reader’s blood hot on their own ... Taibbi’s book is in part a well-reported account of Garner’s life and death and a useful history of Broken Windows policing and its impact ...a procedural drama with a deadly serious subject and without a redemptive finale. It’s another worthy Taibbi chronicle of a dehumanizing bureaucracy that serves and protects its own.
Salman Rushdie
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe point is apparent: the times have produced an arbitrary, indiscriminate form of violence, whether by an organization or a lone nut that can catch any of us anywhere. But the book sheds little light on the America that produces that violence or how it shapes human action and interaction ... Rushdie wants us to see the numbers marching in the United States: 'a plague of jokers, crazy slashmouthed clowns frightening the children.' But the events just sit and stagnate, and I suspect the Goldens could have been anywhere else and still faced the same personal crises ... it’s hard to find someone who isn’t inexhaustibly — and exhaustingly — learned in The Golden House, Rushdie’s erudition flooding page after page, character after character...Rushdie, more than any of his contemporaries that I can think of, renovated our language in the 1980s. There are glimpses of that legacy here, but they’re overshadowed by the sounds of hard linguistic labor ... The denouement of this plot line is ultimately anticlimactic because it is crowded out by other plot lines, but it does offer a glimpse of what Rushdie can still achieve.
Timothy B. Tyson
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...a concise and urgent book ... Expertly, Tyson demarcates and mines the territory of Till’s murder, including why the killers assumed it would go ignored; of the trial, which indeed concluded with a not-guilty verdict; and of the countrywide reaction to both. Yet his analysis of the big national moment does not upstage his attention to the Till family’s unimaginable personal loss. He writes movingly of what Emmett’s life might have been ... the feather in Tyson’s investigative cap, and what gives this exquisite work the strengths of revelatory reportage as well as scholarship, is his interview with Carolyn Bryant, whose admission that 'nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him' provides the poetic title of Tyson’s opening chapter and a humanity that cuts through the book.
Deirdre Bair
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksBair would have done well to include more of this [Prohibition era] context upfront, to highlight how disruptive the Volstead Act was ... While Bair spends much time — too much of it — trying to clear the clutter of Capone myth, she is at her strongest when she gets out of the biographical weeds and gives us a feel of the era. Her most articulate associations of Capone and his times come in the final chapter, and one wishes they’d come earlier ... Bair’s account of the trial is detailed and vital ... While this book is uneven, and significantly more vivid about Capone’s downfall than his reign, Bair’s descriptions of how the world’s preeminent villain spent his final years exercising the mental capacity of a child, close the work on a poignant note.
Lesley M. M. Blume
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn retreading this well-worn turf, Blume presents a sharp portrait of a young nobody desperately, sometimes maliciously, trying to become a great — if not the great — writer of his time ... The result is a spirited account of a spirited age ... Blume provides an epilogue that details the lives of all who were depicted in The Sun Also Rises, and in doing so she encapsulates the novel’s unhappier legacy.
James McBride
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksKill ’Em and Leave is not the kind of account that reeks of the archives, with interminable pages of endnotes and sourcing. Nor is it a chronological account of the life of his subject. Instead, McBride develops an idea of Brown mostly through journalistic profiles of the people who knew him, including Sharpton, his accountant, his manager, members of his band, and other close friends ... McBride scores points for the eerie mood he creates, but unfortunately the profiles, in the aggregate, don’t yield as much as the reader might like. It’s too elliptical an approach, and as he jumps from character to character, the story becomes disjointed. At times he seems more committed to perpetuating Brown’s mystery than uncovering it ... For what Brown accomplished musically, we need a discriminating interpreter, and this is where McBride is on much stronger footing. His description of the emergence of funk, of the difference between jazz and funk solos (comparing the former to basketball and the latter to baseball), and of funk’s emphasis on intuition rather than rote, is masterly ... the book’s total break from conventional biography accounts for its charm but also its weaknesses.
