RaveThe Washington PostVery fine ... This biography is as beautifully researched as it is written; thorough, smart, conscientious and an absolute delight to simmer in.
Michael Stewart Foley
MixedThe AtlanticFoley’s method is to remind each set of fans of the other Cash, the Cash they’ve conveniently forgotten, and then show how he made up a single human being, one who did his own justice to the complex task of being an American. The argument has a certain wishfulness to it. To begin with, there’s the faith Foley places in \'empathy,\' or Cash’s tendency to be \'guided by his own emotional and visceral responses to the issues.\' What thinking person in 2022—amid the outrage and umbrage Olympics that is American life—still wants an emotional response? We prefer, I think, respect, health care, and a living wage. The case made by Cash is less on behalf of \'empathy\' than of a world in which partisan affiliation isn’t a depressingly strong predictor of—well, everything else, including musical taste ... Foley doesn’t say, though he has a maddening tendency to construe the most modest gesture of allyship as a profile in courage ... Some readers may walk away convinced that Cash was a Whitmanesque giant, containing multitudes. I often found myself wondering if he wasn’t a two-faced equivocator. The book is a welcome corrective to the tendency to treat the man as so internally contrary as to be a complete enigma. But the cost of rescuing Cash from the metaphysical fog has been to turn him into a plaster saint. Neither does justice to the actual extent of his weirdness.
Mark Harris
PositiveLos Angeles TimesYou’ll spend much of Harris’s judicious and superbly well-written book trying to puzzle out the relationship of Nichols’ talent to his good fortune ... Mike Nichols: A Life is more the story of a career than a life, of a man who so feared downtime he cluttered it with showplace apartments, country squire estates, Arabian horses and, predictably, trophy spouses. And the critical bead on him got drawn early: He \'imparts muscle to what he touches, but not soul,\' said one of his first critics, and as many have noted since, his movies are defined by precision and urbanity but also a certain chilly self-regard ... His peculiar gift was for making them feel safe being precarious. The essence of life is that it unfolds chronologically and according to no script. Actors must capture this essence, then somehow transfer it into highly artificial situations. If Nichols played taskmaster, it was only to remind them that what is happening here has never happened before; you have no idea what others will say or do next, you must stay spontaneous and reactive — all while subordinating yourself to a larger story. That was, finally, the great, impossible neither/nor of his genius, as it is, too, of Mark Harris’ wonderful book.
Rick Perlstein
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesPerlstein’s books are uninhibitedly large items, constructed, apparently, on the principle of maximum inclusion. He is not a creature of the archives either: These are heavily anecdotal narratives, combining a rehashing of big, media-driven spectacles with a deft appreciation for the smaller tremors...Perlstein sees American culture holistically, and his method is to implant you into the whole of a living tissue. Reaganland is so mammoth in scope and so scrupulously agnostic in presentation, each reader will likely find their own book in there. I walked away grateful for its larger arc ... Reliving this period via Perlstein in what feels like real-time detail, one is shocked to discover how much of our politics remains shaped not by Reagan, but by Carter ... What’s most unsettling about the ’80s is only hinted at in Reaganland: Malaise was cured in the end by mania.
Kurt Andersen
MixedThe Los Angeles TimesAndersen is a confident synthesizer and writes with the zeal of the recently converted ... Should it take a random chat with an \'all-American\' (meaning white) guy’s guy in a bomber jacket to awaken your conscience? He indicates this \'slow-road-to-Damascus moment\' was a recent occurrence. And yet his own thesis is that for 40 years the country has been going to seed. What gives? ... I often found myself wondering: Are we talking about an epochal shift or a random shudder in the zeitgeist? A journalist at heart, Andersen has been trained to believe in the decade as the \'the standard unit of historical time,\' as the social critic Christopher Lasch once put it. The shift we are undergoing now lies so much deeper than that ... Andersen is a gifted simplifier, and he is undeniably correct ... But the pitchfork and guillotine suit him poorly. As he rolled through his roster of usual suspects — Justice Powell, Arthur Laffer, trickle down, think tanks — it began to sing-song in my head like the old Billy Joel song. \'We didn’t start the fire,\' Andersen is saying, by way of offloading a collective guilt onto a handful of devious super villains. In Evil Geniuses, Andersen has served up a big helping of culpa, hold the mea. Who can blame him? He is trying to hustle one last zeitgeist. And what is the zeitgeist saying in return? OK, boomer.
Blake Gopnik
PositiveThe Los Angeles TimesWarhol lived one of the great lives of the 20th century, and he now has a biography worthy of that life ... Even at 976 pages, the book rarely leaves you wanting less ... In this textured portrait of an artist of annihilating smoothness, Gopnik has finely rendered many of Warhol’s milieus. Perhaps most endearing is the intricate social geography of gay New York in the 1940s and ’50s ... In effect, Gopnik has written two books. The first is an exhaustively researched and definitive account of the life. The second is a series of apologies and excuses for a tax cheat, voyeur-sadist, bad son, skinflint, publicity hound, social climber, shopaholic. Some small-bore skepticism along the way might have helped make the canonical judgment more credible.
Joy Williams
MixedThe New York Times...characters float through life as if in a post-traumatic daze, talking past one another (if at all), sliding into loneliness or dementia. To this sensibility is fixed a terse, dread-filled writing style whose pulse it is probably safer not to quicken ... The intersection of spiritual with actual poverty was one that Flannery O\'Connor, Williams\'s most obvious predecessor, knew something about. Williams, however, has taken us further toward total perdition. Now even the most modest possibilities of solace in a God-forsaken universe are missing ... There is barely any landscape in these stories; they seem informed by the kind of wide open American spaces that, while inspiring awe in the short run, bring on delirium over time ... Here, in the collection\'s finest story, Janice holds the sticky hand of one of the children after buying her a butterscotch sundae. The gesture is minuscule, but Williams has left us so starved for affection that it seems momentous.
David Sedaris
PositiveThe New York TimesIt\'s that voice his fans find so addictive: nerdy on the surface, like a Cabbage Patch doll hitting puberty; underneath, cool and adamantine in its many frank appraisals ... As happiness and success are more in evidence, they find themselves balanced against a strange, new attitude of self-reckoning. The opening piece, \'Us and Them,\' is written in that style of quasi-oracular coldness typically reserved for exposing the spiritual emptiness of the suburbs ... The voice must stay balanced: as if to compensate for his plush new life as a publishing-world rock star, Sedaris has perfected the quick, tidy, sermonical soul-search ... Should the balance between hapless Sedaris and rock star Sedaris get out of whack, that comfort proves harder and harder to retail as genuine angst.
Jhumpa Lahiri
MixedThe New York TimesWritten in an elegant hush – even upon rereading, there isn't a single burned raisin in the mix – Lahiri's stories traced out the lives of various Bengali-Americans suffering through various stages of lovelorn distress … The reader has begun to suspect that, graceful and spare as Lahiri's prose is, the simply put does not always equal the deeply felt. How much steely equipoise, after all, can one novel stand? Lahiri is a supremely gifted writer, but at moments in The Namesake it feels as though we've descended from the great Russians to Nick Adams to the PowerPoint voice-over … Its incorrigible mildness and its ungilded lilies aside, Lahiri's novel is unfailingly lovely in its treatment of Gogol's relationship with his father. This is the classic American parent-child bond – snakebit, oblique, half-mumbled – and in Lahiri's rendering, it touches on quiet perfection.
