PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSullivan has avoided the traps for the most part, combining highlights and lowlights of her glass-ceiling-defying career with an opinionated but fair and accessible tour of the big debates roiling the \'reality-based press\' ... The most urgent question she reviews is how to cover openly anti-democratic politicians ... She makes little effort to disguise her left-leaning politics, and while she makes her arguments clearly and with evidence, it’s difficult to identify an opinion that would cause much discomfort in reliably Democratic ZIP codes on the Upper West Side ... Her indictment of the newsroom leadership’s decision-making is often persuasive, but in the era of Facebook and Fox News, when trust in mainstream journalism is in sharp decline, as Sullivan documents elsewhere in her book, it’s hard to accept that The Times’s coverage...could swing an election decided in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
J. Kael Weston
MixedThe New York Review of Books...an ambitious, uneven, but closely observed and illuminating memoir ... At its best, Weston’s reportage recalls the finest foreign correspondence of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Yet his perspective is that of a government insider, one shaken by the human costs of the failures he participated in and especially by the strategic folly of the invasion of Iraq ... His book’s last chapters chronicle his journeys across America to visit the hometowns and graves of Marines who died on his tours. The memoir becomes a kind of scrapbook, not always satisfyingly so. Its final entry, however, is a stunning map of the United States with dots marking all the hometowns of US war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
Eric Fair
PositiveThe New York Review of Books...an important reckoning with more than a decade of continuous war. It is a memoir written in a spare, cadenced voice. It describes the author’s self-aware, agonizing moral and psychological descent as he accepts an assignment as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi detention facilities after 2003. The author’s idealism, pain, and, eventually, expressive political dissent recall Siegfried Sassoon, the British poet and decorated military officer during World War I whose objections to that conflict led the authorities to hospitalize him for what was then called 'shell shock' ... Fair’s memoir never strays far from moral introspection, but his account of his travel is funny and sharp. It draws the reader into dark corners of the Iraqi battlefield—chaotic prisons, overheated interrogation booths, tactical intelligence cells in bunkers—where few other war memoirs enter.
