PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewThe book, a loosely organized account of her own life, and the role of Ginsburg (among other friends) in it, has a genial, likable tone. Totenberg’s stories are lively but never go on too long; she appears to reflexively turn the reader’s attention to the generosity or small kindnesses of others. She writes, without pretension or self-congratulation, about moments of journalistic triumph of which she has every right to be proud. She is also unfailingly discreet, a quality that the reader must concede reflects well on her as a friend. It serves her less well as the author of a memoir whose most central character, outside of Totenberg herself, is one of the most influential, fascinating and, to some, frustrating women of the last century ... For those seeking insights about any remorse Ginsburg might have felt about not retiring while a Democrat was safely serving as president, Totenberg offers little ... Her final display of friendship in this book entails laying bare just how frail Ginsburg truly was — and how extraordinary she was to persevere and inspire for as long as she did.
Emma Straub
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewEven if the premise of This Time Tomorrow is a flight from realism, the scope of Alice’s concerns is human-scale and plausible ... The novel is shot through with aching Our Town celebrations of the mundane, but its most explicit affiliations are with genre and pop culture. In a few instances, familiar character types, or narrative tropes — a dopey boyfriend who feels pressured to propose, a wise and comforting psychic — show up like old friends in a creased photo, two-dimensional but worth holding onto ... Even as it rifles through references, This Time Tomorrow insists on its own originality ... For anyone who lived in New York in 1996, the book provides sweet snippets of lost memories and associations...But its most complex and specific evocations are reserved for the relationship between an amiable, if slightly checked-out, single father and his city-kid daughter, a girl expected to be the solid one in the relationship.
Huma Abedin
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAbedin attempts to answer some of these questions, with varying degrees of success. One senses at times that when she falters, she lacks insight rather than sincerity, which is itself a kind of honest answer: Abedin may be one of the most politically astute and well-traveled women in the world, but she portrays herself as far from worldly, at least in affairs of the heart ... It’s clear from the outset that this book is not a sidekick’s tale, but the story of a person of substance — someone determined to tell her own story, with her name pronounced correctly, for once ... I made it a dozen pages into her first two years working at the White House, started to grasp just how much ground Abedin intended to cover over the course of this 500-page book — and then did what perhaps you are tempted to do right now as you read this review: I skipped ahead to the more dramatic events of her personal life ... I had the sense that in the sections about Clinton, the book was serving as a kind of body woman — that Abedin could not help functioning, even in her own memoir, as someone habitually burnishing Clinton’s image for posterity...she is still messaging, rather than writing with the kind of voice that brings a reader close to history ... Abedin herself does not fully come to life on the page until she actually meets Weiner — which is when the reader also better appreciates how much her upbringing as a faithful Muslim distinguished her in the circles in which she moved ... The catalog of her Job-like suffering — the shame to which she was subject for actions other than her own — is at times excruciating to read; but it is as if in uttering those episodes aloud, she ensures that they do not own her. Huma still fascinates, not because of any lurid details she exposes but because her story serves as a parable, a blinking billboard of a reminder that no one is exempt from suffering. She is far from psychologically minded; but there is, somehow, something comforting in her refusal to find bright sides of the story or purport to share great wisdom as someone who is still standing despite it all. The only way out, she seems to say, was through, which is perhaps not original, but has the benefit of being true ... The book does sometimes suffer from Abedin’s apparent feeling that she cannot afford to seem less than saintly toward others ... an unburdening, an apology and an attempt at restitution. For all its darkness, it is also a gesture of gratitude.
Tammy Duckworth
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewDuckworth, a soldier in her soul, makes no real effort at poetry or ornate excavations of the self; and yet, she has collected enough feats worthy of record to fill at least one strong memoir, a book whose contents are far more gripping, gritty and original than its bromide of a title might suggest ... the book’s most significant failing might be that she has lived through so much that she seems unable to recognize or explore the extraordinary nature of later chapters of her life ... Duckworth reported out facts of that day she previously had not known, and she spares no detail in her dispassionate recounting of the gory clumsiness that marks true crisis. The leavening heroics she also recounts are what make those passages bearable — just ... Having survived so many extremes of human experience, Duckworth seems to brush over details of her life that others might find remarkable, such as the two terms she spent as a member of the House of Representatives in the years following her recovery. We hear about the challenges of dealing with fertility issues and child-rearing while campaigning and serving in the Senate; but Duckworth makes remarkably little of how unusual it is for any woman to have a child, as she did, at age 50, much less one who has her particular history and her recurring chronic pain ... The sheer details of her life are so compelling — so, yes, inspirational — that anyone less plain-spoken might risk veering into sanctimony or sap. If Duckworth’s political career ever comes to an end, she could make a killing as the world’s most matter-of-fact motivational speaker.
Cathleen Schine
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... delightful ... Like the best of those books on language, Schine’s novels — this is her 11th — are often as witty as they are erudite ... Schine takes her readers on deep philosophical dives but resurfaces with craft and humor; her tone is amused and amusing ... How do two people who start out, essentially, as clones, end up believing themselves to be so different? The pleasure of this novel lies in the answers Schine provides through her storytelling, the accretion of moments of chance and perspective that make the various resolutions seem almost inevitable ... The novel’s other luxury is the permission Schine gives herself to revel in language itself ... For better or worse, the moving parts of The Grammarians don’t snap together with the same satisfying click that they do in some of Schine’s earlier novels. The supporting characters feel more peripheral, although that may be formally appropriate for a novel that tries to capture the insularity of identical twins ... What holds The Grammarians aloft, ultimately, is its riveting love story — not the tale of the twins or their respective marriages but of their deep bond with language.
Curtis Sittenfeld
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"In the lives of Sittenfeld’s characters, the lusts and disappointments of youth loom large well into middle age, as insistent as a gang of loud, showy teenagers taking up all the oxygen in the room ... These storytellers are, for the most part, a privileged, educated lot. Their trials, in the grand scheme of things, are manageable enough that they allow easily for comedy, which Sittenfeld is a pro at delivering in the details ... But Sittenfeld doesn’t shy away from poking at the soft spots of a person’s psyche, the painful longings for something exquisite to cut through the ennui of even the most comfortable lives.\
Sue Klebold
MixedThe New York Times Book Review[A Mother's Reckoning] reads as if she had written it under oath, while trying to answer, honestly and completely, an urgent question: What could a parent have done to prevent this tragedy? ... This is writing as action, bursting from a life so choked by circumstance that she could express that sentiment only from within the safety of a 300-page book.
