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Recent Reviews
Sonia Purnell
Mixed The Washington Post \"Churchill was no doubt delighted by reports from her pillow talk, but Purnell wildly overestimates Pamela’s centrality to the war effort...The author insists that all of Pamela’s love affairs were conducted with \'strategic purpose\' and \'patriotic\' intent, but this whole interpretation is oversold and underproved and sometimes ludicrously phrased ... Purnell’s grasp of recent American history is shaky, but her case for Harriman’s impact on Democratic politics is much stronger than the one she makes for her subject’s World War II significance ... Purnell tells a brisk tale, but her book lacks the authority and judgment of Sally Bedell Smith’s Reflected Glory, the Pamela biography that appeared in 1996. For all the surface sparkle and erotic commotion to Pamela Harriman’s life, any of her biographers has to cope with the peculiar deadness inside such an apparently vital subject, one whose remorseless, mechanical nature still renders her, even at this long remove, more repellent than fascinating.\
Heath Hardage Lee
Mixed Air Mail Well-researched but awkwardly constructed ... One crippling feature of Lee’s technique is the way it often and exasperatingly doesn’t make clear who is speaking or writing within a set of quotation marks.
Garth Risk Hallberg
Mixed The New Yorker The author’s spot-on wit remains playfully evident ... Still, readers have little chance to discern the social texture of 2011 while the characters are staring so deeply into themselves ... This is a book where the public and the political are constantly muffled in deference to the personal, the work of a virtuoso muralist forsaking murals for high-res miniatures.
McKay Coppins
Positive The New York Times Book Review Revealing ... In many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions ... The depicted \'reckoning\' is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within.
Carl Sferrazza Anthony
Rave The New Yorker Anthony does nice work, without fetching too far, when he ties the column’s subject matter to Jackie’s biographical time line ... Anthony astutely conveys the couple’s “mutual ambition” and shared emotional reticence ... The title Camera Girl, drawn from her column’s rubric, implies the importance of images to Anthony’s book
Paterson Joseph
Positive The New York Times Book Review If one may quibble... objection could be made to a bit too much jumping back and forth in time, and perhaps to the whole conceit that the diaries are being sent, inside a letter full of \'retrospective interjections,\' to Sancho’s youngest son, Billy ... But thanks to Joseph, Sancho — in whatever rhetorical mode, at whatever age, amid whatever horrors or triumphs — is always a brimming, companionable narrator of his own story ... With the conjuring tricks of historical fiction, Joseph has taken an actual man and, two and a half centuries later, made him as thoroughly himself, and as fully present, as he was the first time round.
Vesna Goldsworthy
Rave The New Yorker The emotions of this well-conjured novel are raw, its observations acute. Goldsworthy is so intent on getting where she wants to go that, from the book’s earliest pages, she repeatedly—and artfully—telegraphs its bitter ending ... Goldsworthy has constructed a sharply etched, more repressive variant of the Yugoslavia where she grew up ... This wholly satisfying novel winds up being about personal, not political, disloyalty, but the character drama is thrown into high relief against all the First and Second World-building that the author carries out ... By casting aside the traces of literary dependence and making Iron Curtain fully Milena’s story, Goldsworthy allows her protagonist to be what’s at stake.
John A. Farrell
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Farrell can, in his sympathy for his subject, let Kennedy’s core failings seem incidental, to soften terrible behavior with a kind of dictional lotion and to dispense forgiveness even before laying out the particulars of an offense ... The accomplishments did accrue, and Farrell does a particularly good job of highlighting the largely forgotten work Kennedy did on behalf of the world’s refugees ... Farrell can be tough, here and there, about the matter but his heart isn’t in the indictment. The facts of Kennedy’s behavior may be there on the page, but they always seem to be soothed toward absolution by Farrell’s tone ... His long, flagrantly unfaithful marriage to the tormented and alcoholic Joan Bennett makes for consistently painful reading ... Farrell performs a lively reconstruction of Kennedy’s losing challenge to the incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, capturing the men’s petty and mutual miscomprehension, along with their essential difference ... Once in a while Farrell adds too many ruffles and flourishes to his prose...But for the most part Ted Kennedy is a sturdy, if partisan, production. The ampleness of Farrell’s research attests to both his Ph.D. in history and his long career as a political reporter. It is his misfortune to be publishing this book only two years after the first volume of Neal Gabler’s Ted Kennedy biography appeared, and just weeks before the second one is due. Farrell’s is a sensibly shorter single volume, but both biographers see their subject in terms of redemption — Kennedy’s determination to expiate personal failings through legislative good works ... An almost pastoral perspective still governs tellings of Edward Kennedy’s life, and so long as it remains in place, the subject, fairly or not, can’t really lose for winning.
Paula Byrne
Mixed The New Yorker ... a fatter, bolder affair. Its judgments are mostly sound, but for all its heft there’s something headlong about it. The arch titles of its short chapters (\'In which Miss Pym is sent away to Boarding School\') make no tonal sense. Whatever fantasy exercises Pym may have indulged in, it is hardly apt \'to imagine her life as a picaresque adventure, with a Fieldingesque narrative,\' as Byrne insists on doing. The dust-jacket photograph of a young Barbara Pym sitting on a rock is even cropped in such a way that she appears to be taking a pratfall.
Dwight Chapin
Mixed Washington Post The sad and sometimes chilling story of Chapin’s relationship with the cast-iron H.R. Haldeman ... Chapin offers the reader sympathetic and defensive glimpses of Nixon, depicting him as \'a very sensitive man\' ... His overall estimation of Nixon remains high but confused ... Chapin’s biggest achievement involved setting up Nixon’s trips, in 1972, to China and the Soviet Union. Understandably, given all the lows that would follow, he oversells the former ... Chapin makes a handful of fair revisionist points ... But when in his acknowledgments he starts climbing onto the grassy-knoll version of Watergate...a reader can only sigh. Before this, Chapin offers some bits of Watergate trivia that may be news to readers ... The President’s Man is an amiable if sometimes lurching and repetitive reminiscence. There is no real spark to most of the prose.
Douglas Stuart
Rave Air Mail Life in the sandstone tenements and government high-rises of post-industrial Glasgow is no less miserable in Young Mungo’s 1990s than it was in Shuggie Bain’s 80s ... But if at first many of the elements—heightened here, toned-down there—seem gruesomely familiar, Young Mungo gradually becomes a catastrophic world of its own, amplifying the achievement of Stuart’s spectacular debut ... Structurally, this second novel is more ambitious than the first. Stuart runs two alternating narrative lines that must finally converge ... Across the 800 pages of his two novels, Stuart has been inking a great Hogarthian print, a postmodern Scottish Gin Lane. He can be sardonically funny ... Scottish diction—\'weans\' for children; \'boak\' for vomit; \'cannae\' for \'can’t\'—is dappled onto the novel with a vivid sparingness, enough to enhance the unique geography ... the most exceptional feature of Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain may be the way the books avoid any feeling of autofictional self-pity, no matter that Stuart himself sprang from their milieu ... There is right now no novelist writing more powerfully than Douglas Stuart.
Carl Bernstein
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... charming ... Anyone seeking relief from hashtags, tweets and Instagram is free to revel in the book’s pre-cyber lingo of subheads, galley proofs and \'stocks final\' editions ... Along with the paraphernalia, Mr. Bernstein gives us the people, a few of them familiar, most of them unknown or long-forgotten. He capably resurrects the stylishly dressed city editor Sid Epstein, whose meticulousness and strength made him the man Carl Bernstein hoped to become ... Chasing History contains its share of boilerplate...and while Mr. Bernstein has clearly consulted his old reporter’s notebooks, certain incidents and conversations are recalled with an unlikely quotient of conveniently colorful detail. The stentorian tones of the latter-day Bernstein, what one now hears from him on CNN, occasionally sound between its covers, but this is a book chiefly distinguished by nostalgia and warmth.
Jonathan Franzen
Positive The New York Times Book Review Franzen memorably upends expectations, surprising us with Marion’s long-held secrets. Their surfacing and release transforms her from a cipher into a Fury ... without overdoing things, he has nicely textured the last, confused years of the Age of Aquarius ... The author’s dialogue, especially in argument, remains fast and nimble, elevated a bit beyond believability in the manner of a good script ... Franzen’s novels do raise the question of whether characters can be over-realized, so round that they begin to lose any edge. Nothing ever goes unsaid by the narrative voice, no matter whose point of view it comes from; the author’s copious imagination would always rather add than select ... what Russ appears to ask toward the end of Crossroads — \'Did words give expression to emotion, or did they actively create it?\' — gets closer still to a prescriptive inclination that the morally serious Franzen may even now yearn to pursue. Crossroads, we are told, is the first book of a trilogy, and if the Hildebrandts move forward in time, they will take their author with them back toward the here and now, where fiction retains its slim, dwindling chance to influence the life it reflects.
James Merrill, Ed. by Stephen Yenser and Langdon Hammer
Rave The New York Times A cosmopolitan, bejeweled and philosophical chronicle of friendship, love, sex and work ... A Whole World gives us glimpses and assessments of Merrill’s poetic elders, as well as his contemporaries, and then eventually his disciples. Merrill found that letters, in which one can get away with an aperçu instead of a whole argument, suited him better than essays. Quick comparative literary judgments became an epistolary specialty ... He was generous with his advice and his money, and the letters he sent, whether or not they enclosed a check, were carefully crafted presents. Their entertainment never feels like a performance for posterity, but rather something directed at the living, individual recipient, who seems to be sitting directly across from the sender ... Artifice is his way of being natural. With Jamesian syntax and Wildean wit, he lavishes his correspondents with parody, puns and aphorism ... These letters went into the mail fully formed and polished, but this new collection of them, arriving a quarter-century into letter-writing’s death spiral, assures their monumentality.
Thomas Grattan
Rave The New Yorker [A] sharply accomplished first novel by a forty-seven-year-old author who up to now has published just a scattering of quietly daring short stories ... The Recent East gives an excellent sense of its chosen then and there, but this is historical fiction in which history remains secondary to personality, where national reunification is less important than the characters’ attempts to make their own stressed-out psychologies cohere ... Grattan’s short stories have been especially adept at rendering the emotional and physical gropings of adolescent gay boys, whose gestures of affection often get lost in aggressive disguises ... Udo remains the book’s central mystery, and it is an indication of Grattan’s skill, not a limitation, that his character never really adds up. Was his participation in the attack some wayward, subconscious release of furies built up but suppressed through decades of totalitarianism? The novelist cannot say, because, finally, he doesn’t know. Part of realism is the acceptance of mystery, especially when it involves human nature. If Adela’s moral erasure of Udo is understandable, Grattan’s sticking with him is nervy, even fearless ... Grattan’s story stretches almost to the present day, but its shuffled chronology makes us feel that we never really leave any of the decades to which the author keeps returning. He even has a nice technique, sparingly used, by which a character’s projections of the future get rendered in the past tense. His command of his story’s intricate continuities, something rarer in a novelist than readers often realize, may signal how long and deeply he has been imagining the book ... But the book never engenders the airless, autofictive feeling that the writer is the story rather than its teller ... Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers ... Fiction, as always, will have to play catch-up, which is what Thomas Grattan’s career now seems splendidly to be doing.
Martin Amis
Mixed The Wall Street Journal If Henry James could characterize some 19th-century novels as \'loose, baggy monsters,\' Inside Story is a grab-baggy one, an intermittently bracing but mostly exasperating (and familiar) miscellany from the most gifted English writer of his time. The book is full of sudden U-turns, long asides and copious footnotes ... Without ever coalescing, the book adds up (sort of) to a meditation on decay and dying and death, phenomena that Mr. Amis has witnessed, up close, in several of his life’s most important people ... The freshest, most harrowing material of Inside Story involves the illness and death of Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Amis’s friend since their shared tyro days on the New Statesman in the 1970s. On the pages that he occupies (too few of the total), \'the Hitch\' will seem fully alive to anyone who ever knew or read or just YouTubed him ... The author tells us that \'plots demand constant attention,\' but if Inside Story has one, it would seem derived from constant distraction ... Mr. Amis remains a peerless composer of phrases and paragraphs ... But these perfect little pictures seem to be off their hooks and scattered on the floor of what remains a construction site. Mr. Amis plays with the conceit of inviting readers into his book as if welcoming them to his actual house in Brooklyn...but it’s doubtful that many of them will feel at home here.
Hilary Mantel
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The Mirror and the Light, the third and final book...is another crowded Tudor panoply viewed entirely through the eyes of Cromwell, whose nature is as labyrinthine as the palace corridors he superintends ... For all its political and literary plotting, The Mirror and the Light is most memorable for its portraiture, with Cromwell acting as our Holbein, challenging us to weigh his interpretive assessments against our enormous accumulated knowledge of his concerns, biases and kinks ... It is impossible not to admit that this final volume, nearly twice the length of the more kinetic Bring Up the Bodies, becomes woefully labored. Thomas Cromwell is a marvelous prism and a phenomenally round character, but by the time we’ve had 1,700 pages of him, he is drastically overdetermined. Some of the repetition may stem from a desire to give each volume in the trilogy a degree of autonomy, but in this latest book one senses Mantel’s simply excessive zeal in sculpting the protagonist ... The Wolf Hall trilogy is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade; the first two volumes both won Man Booker Prizes. But after Bring Up the Bodies the enterprise, like Henry, has put on weight and self-importance. The final book feels heavier with food and custom and ceremony; catalogs of saints’ relics, clothing and wedding presents ... After the vast and painstaking narrative that has preceded them, the book’s final 75 pages may actually feel rushed, but the speed is artistically appropriate to the abruptness of the matter.
Craig Fehrman
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... delightfully instructive ... immensely enhanced by [Ferhman\'s] awareness of American publishing history, which allows him to present all these political volumes in a cultural and business context ... supplies not only the intermittent history of American publishing already referred to but also some thumbnail historiography ... If Mr. Fehrman can sometimes teeter on the syrupy brink of seeing the presidency as an awesome burden (LBJ’s phrase), his judgments remain almost always clear-eyed and sound. Some of the most entertaining can be found in footnotes ... Mr. Fehrman’s own style is relentlessly peppy and digressive; he is forever setting up a story and then racing off in pursuit of another before returning to the first. The interruptus effect makes a number of his chapters feel like the presidency of Grover Cleveland. Brief appearances by unsung American readers strive to add a democratic amplitude to the author’s history of publishing and literary tastes, but they result mostly in narrative confusion ... Even so, overexuberance beats sourness, and Author in Chief ends up being one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years ... Mr. Fehrman does justice to his several dozen subjects, who through their books keep spinning, even when in their graves
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton
Positive The New Yorker ... the essential volume for any understanding of what actually went on ... With \'Lizzie\' as its principal author, The Dolphin Letters turns out to be a better and a more important book than The Dolphin ... Hardwick’s alternations of mood, between forbearance and anger, are not the manic kind that Lowell suffered. They reflect a fluctuating, improvised rebuilding, more suited to prose than to self-mythologizing poetry ... Lowell’s conduct in every part of the story, not just his eventual abuse of Hardwick’s letters, seems worse in this Rashomon-like volume than it has in previous tellings ... Hamilton approaches the particulars here with deep knowledge and occasionally overexcited exegesis.
Edmund Morris
Mixed Air Mail The lyric acuity that the late Edmund Morris brought to biography is on flickering, posthumous display ... The engineering and political maneuvers it would soon take to light up Lower Manhattan—a sort of demonstration project for the rest of the world—are rendered by Morris with casual rapture ... The loveliness of such narrative moments counterbalances what results from Morris’s attempts, elsewhere, to extract a kind of poetic thrill from the specialized vocabularies of experimentation ... This apparent effort to spellbind through diction only ends with the reader’s eyes glazed over. Even so, Morris continues with such technical rhapsodies, sometimes letting the men in Edison’s story get lost in the machines, as if the biographer were perpetrating a kind of industrial accident ... Maddening failures of exposition and resonance occur because of this structural experiment that Morris refuses to abandon ... the ass-backwards strategy of Edison seems merely perverse, a pointless gesture of literary self-assertion that leaves form flummoxing function at every turn ... Morris’s constant reversals ultimately take down the whole grid and leave the reader in the dark.
Duncan White
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [White] captures something essential about McCarthy ... Mr. White unfolds the sordid tale of Soviet literary history through all its later decades of crackdowns, thaws and renewed panics ... Tonally judicious, Mr. White remains alert to democratic excess in combatting horrors on the totalitarian side. But touches of what Jeane Kirkpatrick used to call \'moral equivalence\' inevitably result. Having done such a good job showing the sufferings of writers under Nikolai Yezhov ’s NKVD, the author might reconsider writing, 500 pages later, that \'the paranoia of the Cold War was bipolar\' ... With so much background to be filled in, the book sometimes strays from its specific, subtitular mission and turns into a history of the Cold War itself. One wishes Mr. White hadn’t bothered to deal with Kim Philby at such length ... consistently absorbing, its prose clear and its syntax sure-footed. But a certain entropy threatens the book. As it flies in different directions, chronology hits some air pockets ... Here and there an error catches the eye ... One of the virtues of his book is the way it makes a reader acknowledge how close the weary West came to losing its nerve.
Joshua Furst
Mixed The New Yorker Never seen from the inside out, Lenny remains the sum of his loud and repetitious behaviors, and, as with Hoffman himself, a little of him goes a long way. Revolutionaries is best when Lenny is out of sight—locked up or on the run ... Phil Ochs, appearing without an alias, is the book’s most poignant figure—and, in fact, a far richer subject for a novel than Abbie Hoffman. The reader initially cringes as this gentle folksinger, spiralling through delusions of persecution, becomes a fat and drunk maunderer. But Furst’s portrait of him ends up being rounded and tender ... Revolutionaries also has to fight its way out of the long shadow cast by The Book of Daniel (1971), E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the surviving son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, a couple closely modelled on the Rosenbergs ... Revolutionaries is a much more modest production. It is, to be sure, over-exampled and overdetermined, but it knows how to get out of its own way—how, intermittently, to turn down the political and historical volume to let a reader see instead of just hear.
Colin Asher
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... generally sturdy ... Mr. Asher has had much fuller access than previous biographers to FBI files that detail the bureau’s long surveillance of Algren. There is no denying its effects, but Mr. Asher exaggerates them into “the cause of his career’s decline” and swaddles an overworked political thesis with facile boilerplate about the 1950s. Algren’s own character flaws had plenty to do with his inability to sustain his gifts and career ... When not emphasizing politics, Mr. Asher is levelheaded and illuminating. His book is also peppered with unusually charming and informative footnotes. There are moments of callow discovery and the occasional gaffe, But Never a Lovely So Real has heft and heart, and it displays the sort of respect and loyalty to its subject that the novelist paid to the struggling, real-life people he put into his books.
Tom Barbash
Mixed The Wall Street Journal Most of the historical context feels authentic; some of it is rote; a few bits are wholly implausible. Teddy Kennedy (who called his wife \'Joansie,\' not \'Joanie\') converses no more believably than Lennon ... With his considerable talents, the author can’t help but do a number of things very well... but there’s an airless slow motion to the production as a whole ... . The book might have benefited from the multiple points of view employed in the author’s first novel. Some episodes are overelaborated, and some incidents that we only hear about seem to be lost opportunitie ... by underlining so many of the book’s themes and meanings, the author makes the reader lazy, asks so much less of him than [Barbash\'s] compacted short stories did ... Like the proverbial thin man trying to get out of a fat one, a half-dozen stories could break free from this book. In Mr. Barbash’s capable hands, their individual effects would be greater than the sum of this novel’s parts.
Colm Tóibín
Positive The Washington Post Tóibín takes a personal approach to biographical discovery, dovetailing reminiscences of his own Dublin days with anecdotes about his subjects ... For all this interconnectedness, Tóibín manages to give each literary father a section of his own ... The last stretch of Tóibín’s book is the most straightforward, the closest in method to conventional literary criticism ... even in its plain-spoken final section, this gentle, immersive book holds literary scholarship to be a heartfelt, heavenly pursuit.
Craig Brown
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Brown, a longtime contributor to Private Eye magazine, is capable of witty concision ... His Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, some of them Rashomonian, are mostly fast and entertaining ... Too much of the book, like so much of its subject’s life, is extraneous ... It isn’t a thirst for fairness that makes one bring a book like this to the beach, but here and there a reader may wish the author had given Margaret a smidgen more credit.
Christopher Bonanos
Rave The New Yorker Now Christopher Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous has displaced a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, Weegee by Weegee, published in 1961. Bonanos resurrects the inky roar of this world with a fine, nervy lip ... Weegee and his world don\'t encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him.
Martin Amis
Positive The New Yorker \"The reporting pieces have a fair share of old chestnuts (the book-tour essay) and barrelled fish (a Republican Convention), but none is without its stinging pleasures ... a very dated piece on the pre-Pornhub porn industry grinds on, further distracting a reader from the book’s heart, which is its literary criticism, labor that allows Amis to realize his most comfortable and integrated self: a novelist engaged in the scrupulous appreciation of others’ style ... The Rub of Time, like Martin Amis’s other critical collections, is itself something of a style manual, with corrective passages that fall somewhere between patient mini-lectures and readings of the riot act ... He can exhibit a near-nasty streak in dealing with his correspondents—the new collection includes two samplings called You Ask the Questions—but more typically Amis cherishes the most cosmopolitan virtue of all, humor.\
Peter Carey
Pan The New York Times Sunday Book Review Like most of Carey’s inventive, maximalist entertainments, Parrot and Olivier is replete with expressed feeling, if too wittily contrived for actual passion. The story is told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, and it’s hard to say where the emotional focus finally lies. Master and servant bump along through fits of contempt and pity and occasional affection, without ever really fusing or fully breaking apart … Sentence for sentence, Carey’s writing remains matchlessly robust. Sailors cling ‘to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm,’ while inside a dark parlor old ladies sit ‘wetting their hairy chins with stout.’ But as the book’s bravura paragraphs grow into chapters, the author seems unable to decide whether it’s Democracy in America or Martin Chuzzlewit or, once more, Great Expectations he’d like to inflate and transform.
Walter Stahr
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...a judiciously sympathetic treatment that tries to calm a still-uncalmable subject ... Stahr admits that his subject was 'duplicitous and even deceitful,' but argues that he was 'a great man' if not a good one. He was almost certainly indispensable in the preservation of a system that has since allowed us to be freely led by a long succession of good and great and awful and, finally, absurd men.
Shirley Hazzard
Positive The Atlantic [The Great Fire] streaks through a reader's ken in the manner of a comet, quickly seizing the attention and emotions before disappearing, trailed by hopes for the characters' happiness—which, like a comet's return, the reader only half believes in … ‘All speech is an exposure,’ Hazzard writes in this new book, some of whose dialogue...may strike one as bordering on the precious or implausible. But in fact it never forces a suspension of disbelief, because Hazzard's narration is more articulate than almost anything we're now accustomed to reading: what's within quotation marks seems credible simply by the standard of what's without.
Geraldine Brooks
Pan The New York Times Sunday Book Review In March, the ferocious nemeses conjured by Brooks are war and slavery, which...end up prompting the author and her characters toward a prolonged moral exhibitionism … Like Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March, Brooks's version has gone south with Union troops as a chaplain. But he has another, real-life source in Alcott's father, Bronson, whose slew of Transcendentalist pieties go into the new character's pack. Brooks's novel winds up being both counterfactual and counterfictional … March makes a distressing contribution to recent trends in historical fiction, which, after a decade or so of increased literary and intellectual weight, seems to be returning to its old sentimental contrivances and costumes.
Margaret Atwood
Pan The New York Times Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. In The Blind Assassin, overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total … The Chase girls' childhood – tutors, kitchen conversation, factory picnics – is played out at great length, and while social information should be more highly prized than it is in the modern literary novel, Atwood sometimes operates with the indiscriminate retrieval of an Internet search engine set to ‘display all’ … The less said about Planet Zycron the better; Atwood, alas, says plenty. She lengthily taxonomizes the city of Sakiel-Norn and its class-stratified inhabitants...but she proves unable to relieve the reader's tedium with the place's kinkier features, like children who weave carpets until they are blind and then go on to become throat-cutting hired killers.
David A. Nichols
Mixed The Wall Street Journal The author’s praise for the president’s strategy can border on the fulsome, but it is supported by facts and some new source material. Mr. Nichols’s Eisenhower plays a long game that draws on 'traditions of military deception' ... Cleanly written and consistently judicious, Mr. Nichols’s book would have gained additional power by deviating from its moment-by-moment timeline to explore the motivating biographies of its important figures ... Ike and McCarthy shows how hard it was, and how long it took, for a president to rein in a single senator. It remains for the reader to discern in this book a rough, inverted image of our own time, with the polarity reversed between the White House and the Congress.
George Saunders
Rave The New Yorker Saunders does a fine job—and has a fine time—quickening his little necropolis to literary life ... Although readers may feel that Lincoln in the Bardo has little in common with the author’s dystopian short stories, there’s actually quite a lot of similarity in preoccupation and technique. Saunders often pays imaginative attention to corporations, bureaucracies, and nomenclature, and he has a predilection for creepy theme parks...In Saunders’s hands, Oak Hill, too, is a kind of theme park, with various rules and precincts and spectacles, as well as opportunities for the author’s parodic gifts ... Even with this granular structure and its comic interludes, the book gathers a satisfying momentum, enough to reveal what Saunders has called, in one of his essays, a novel’s Apparent Narrative Rationale—what the writer and the reader have tacitly agreed the book is ‘about' ... he also elects to venture into Lincoln’s awareness and perceptions, and, when he does, it’s an all-in enterprise, a physical incursion undertaken not only to extract characterizing thoughts but also to influence them...Saunders is giving us an imaginative truth in keeping with a number of startling and benevolent short stories he has written, ones that end with characters reaching a low point and then pulling themselves back up.
Brendan King
Positive The New York Times Book Review King often seems more exasperated than awed by his subject, and he emends with relish ... He lacks anything like his subject’s 'impressive concision,' but he does succeed in offering a vivid and detailed — and often harrowing — story.
Robert Gottlieb
Positive The New York Times Book Review Robert Gottlieb’s buoyant memoir of his indefatigable editorial career proves Noël Coward’s observation that work is more fun than fun ... Gottlieb confesses to the writers he was sorry to lose and the occasional good riddance, but he throws so many bouquets that the perfume can sometimes give the reader a bit of a headache ... Some of this memoir’s keenest pleasures come from a series of portraits that demonstrate how the author’s most profound associations and friendships have been with women.
Jean Edward Smith
Positive The New Yorker Bush doesn’t feel like a hatchet job. Like Bush himself, it is susceptible to sudden changes of heart and tone, and it never quite gets over a sense of loss for aspects of the pre-9/11 figure that Smith seems to enjoy imagining, however sketchily, in the book’s early stages ... As persuasively as anyone before him, Smith presents a strong story of how a successful military mission quickly unaccomplished itself; turned into quite something else ... Smith may have the Carlylean sense that history is shaped more by the decisions of individuals than by the large movements of social forces, but he is fundamentally more a historian than he is a biographer, and much more comfortable when his current subject is holding a meeting in the Roosevelt Room than when he is riding his off-road Trek bicycle.
Jonathan Lee
Rave The New Yorker [A]t his best—and he is at it often—Lee displays a nimble metaphysical wit and a verbal ingenuity on a par with Martin Amis’s ... It is Jonathan Lee’s great achievement to have written, on this of all subjects, one of the gentlest novels in memory.