MixedThe Wall Street JournalHagiographic ... Neither biography nor cultural criticism, seems happy to skirt along the surface of Ms. Swift’s success.
Sebastian Junger
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAt its best, In My Time of Dying is Mr. Junger as pure \"meaning junkie\": He attempts to wrestle with both the totality of his many near-death experiences and the potential that, in those liminal moments, we may apprehend a reality (we might even call it an afterlife) that transcends our human understanding ... It is painful, visceral reading. Mr. Junger’s prose doesn’t simply bring home the immediacy of his own averted death; it demands we anticipate our own demise ... At times, In My Time of Dying risks being little more than a book-length memento mori.
Mary Gabriel
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe Madonna that emerges from Ms. Gabriel’s pages is a force of nature ... It is a shame, therefore, that Ms. Gabriel...harbors a fondness for her subject that causes her to shy away from a more nuanced treatment of Madonna’s complications ... In Ms. Gabriel’s telling, Madonna is an uncomplicated heroine, one whose support for feminism, queer social justice and black artistic visibility renders her a straightforward but far less interesting figurehead of liberation .... The author’s accounts of Madonna’s sexual controversies are so one-sided as to elide the genuine shock they evoked at the time ... By neutering the dark sides of that desire, Madonna: A Rebel Life makes Madonna too likeable and renders her less of a rebel than she in fact is.
Erika Fatland
RaveThe Wall Street JournalOfficially, the book is a travelogue-cum-cultural history, tracing the author’s journey across the 14 countries bordering the world’s largest country. (Of them, only the author’s native Norway was never occupied by Russia.) In practice, however, the book is a hauntingly lyrical meditation to the contingencies of history, the sheer arbitrariness of dividing lines and border posts, of namesakes forgotten and remembered, of successful and unsuccessful wars ... Ms. Fatland sets out, she tells us (via Kari Dickson’s archly smooth, British-inflected translation), \'to understand a country and its people from the outside, from the perspective of its neighbours,\' to identify a quintessential \'Russianness\' through an investigation of the often-liminal spaces of its periphery ... What Ms. Fatland succeeds in doing, to the book’s credit, is both greater in scale and more intimate than her stated aim. Through a series of slickly told, vignette-style chapters, moving from the uncanny valley of North Korean package tours to drunken revelry in the Georgian mountains, Ms. Fatland offers less an account of Russianness than of its subversion: a polyphonic vision of often-arbitrary identities, histories and voices. The idea that we can speak meaningfully about capital-h History comes across, in Ms. Fatland’s wry telling, as faintly absurd ... Borders, for the people Ms. Fatland interviews along her journey, are less about identity than about practicality ... s. Fatland’s greatest gift, after all, is listening and saying nothing, allowing the people she meets to reveal themselves in meticulously rendered dramatic monologues, capturing their tics, eccentricities and detailed personal histories. She revels in the complexity of her interviewees as individuals, not examples.
Volker Weidermann
MixedThe New RepublicWeidermann’s language is at once haunting and ornamental: an antique music-box of melancholic atmosphere ... [but his] odd decision to blend biography with novelistic episodes works on an atmospheric level, but it’s less convincing on a narrative level.
