RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Maniac does, by and large, assume the guise of fiction...but I did find myself wondering what it gained from this that a (minor and essentially rhetorical) tweak into long-form journalism would retract ... At its best...you just throw up your hands and think, Who cares what discourse label we assign this stuff? It’s great ... If there is a critique to be leveled at Labatut, it falls in the realm not of genre but of gender. Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac, women function as bit players ... To be fair, Labatut’s not unaware of this. If he can’t retro-populate White Sands with female leads, he at least grants his women broader, more incisive wisdom.
Jason Stanley
RaveThe GuardianThe book provides a fascinating breakdown of the fascist ideology, nimbly interweaving examples from Germany, Italy and Hungary, from Rwanda and Myanmar to Serbia and, yes, the U.S. As he proceeds through his framework of the broadest features of his subject, Stanley includes smaller observations that may for some readers land bracingly close to home ... Stanley’s acute awareness of the power of the term, and the subtlety of his argument here, must contribute to the fact that he does not explicitly brand Trump a \'fascist.\' Nor does he harp on \'Make America great again.\' It is a misfortune of yet-unknown dimensions that he does not have to.
Stormy Daniels
PositiveThe Irish Times[An] intensely intimate portrait of a clownish and insecure Trump ... Beginning with Daniels’s youth as a girl named Stephanie Clifford growing up in Louisiana, Full Disclosure tells a vivid story of childhood poverty, neglect and abuse, including sexual abuse by a middle-aged man beginning when Daniels was nine years old. The stories are intercut with light moments such as her time with a beloved pet horse and a crush on Patrick Swayze so intense she kissed a hole in her Dirty Dancing poster.
David Foster Wallace
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewIt seems to me there are two ways of understanding the document assembled from a jumble of boxes, disks and printed or handwritten papers…The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or ‘late capitalism,’ and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh … the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation.
