RaveThe New York Times Book Review[A] fascinating excavation of four intellectual powerhouse women of the 16th and early 17th centuries ... Targoff’s intent is to scrape away the layer of literary obscurity from Shakespeare’s sisters and present the pentimento as transcendent survivors. Their work indeed lives on.
John Guy
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA fierce, scholarly tour de force. The authors, a husband-and-wife historian team, are a dream pairing. There is an intensity to their research ... Their freshest insights are into Anne’s prelapsarian (i.e., pre-Henry) life ... Brilliantly shows how time, circumstance and politics combined to accelerate Anne’s triumph and tragedy. We see how the oscillating power shifts in Europe were as determinative of her fate as the more familiar plottings of the Tudor court.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex
MixedThe Guardian (UK)One of the few good decisions that Prince Harry has made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer. Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed, conflicted worldview. Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success ... He writes as if he is the first privileged male to notice the unfairness of primogeniture ... Harry’s unreconstructed laddishness eventually starts to get as tiresome for the reader as it did for his family ... Harry’s most extreme misunderstanding in Spare concerns the topic he affects to know most about: how the deep state of the Palace works.
Sarah Gristwood
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDense but compelling ... The Tudors in Love is at its best at these moments, when Gristwood’s prism of courtly love is smashed by the cruelty of power politics and we get the gripping — and heartbreaking — history of trapped royal women over more than a century ... We have seen and read so many depictions of Catherine as a sobbing victim that it’s refreshing here to be reminded that once married to Henry, she reigned over a cultured, respectful court ... Gristwood likewise manages to humanize Catherine’s Catholic daughter, \'Bloody\' Mary ... Gristwood’s Mary burns with vivid emotional suffering.
Julie Satow
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewA great hotel is a theater of dreams, and Julie Satow, a journalist who covers New York real estate, digs deep into the forces that took the Plaza from a living center of aspiring social connection tied to the fortunes of American high society to its present status in an atomized era of pitiless transactional globalism ... At its humming height, Satow tells us in one of her dazzling fact riffs, the Plaza employed a staff of 1,500, “including 50 each of chambermaids, housemaids and bell boys; plus 200 waiters, 75 laundresses and 25 porters ... Satow, of course, offers a pungent chapter on the Plaza’s most popular literary avatar, Eloise, and her creator, the volatile diva Kay Thompson ... It’s galling to have to admit that Trump is the owner who leaps most vividly from the pages of this entertaining history, just as he does from cable TV ... The other great character in this teeming cast is not a billionaire but a union leader. Peter Ward represented the 35,000 bellmen, doormen, banquet waiters and maids who made up the powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council. By the time he enters the story, we’re thirsting to hear more about the downstairs life of the Plaza. I wish Satow had dwelt more on the lives of that pyramid of toiling housemaids, laundresses, bellhops and waiters who kept the Titanic afloat. Just as the flashy museums and universities of the United Arab Emirates are built on the backs of abused migrant workers, the Plaza’s luxury was underpinned by many decades of exploitation.
Anne de Courcy
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Husband Hunters, Anne de Courcy’s diverting new study of this phenomenon, is at its best when she’s exploring why [American heiresses married titled Europeans]. She makes a persuasive case that a prime driver in the American heiress exodus was escape from the savage competitiveness of Gilded Age society in the capital of status, New York ... The Husband Hunters has a lot to say about the young American women who married titles, but at heart it’s a wonderful study of monster mothers ... What impresses about de Courcy’s American imports is how efficiently they adapted their native skills to England’s resistant class structure ... De Courcy conjures it all with skill.
Laura Thompson
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Six is riveting. It captures all the wayward magnetism and levity that have enchanted countless writers without neglecting the tragic darkness of many of the sisters’ life choices and the savage sociopolitical currents that fueled them ... The most fascinating of the portraits in The Six is of Diana, the peerless beauty of the family...Thompson wonderfully evokes her coup de foudre with [British Union of Facists leaser] Oswald Mosley.
David Hare
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBut all credit to Hare for giving us his shabbiness as well as his triumphs. By the time he brought down the curtain I had come to understand what a vibrant force he has been for wringing excellence out of people, including himself. The Blue Touch Paper is an engrossing dive into the passions, the disappointments, the quarrels and the elation of a great professional trying to get something done.
