RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAn exceptional new piece of popular science ... Grim thoughts are tempered by levity: A City on Mars is hilarious. The breezy prose is studded with charming cartoons that illustrate everything ... Most of the book is devoted to fascinating, practical questions of colonization ... This book will make you happy to live on this planet — a good thing, because you’re not leaving anytime soon.
Elyssa Maxx Goodman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s a sprawling book, a bit overambitious, but animated by the fire of a queen who knew she’d been wronged ... Goodman’s commitment to exploring every nook of the city’s drag history means her tale moves too quickly ... The book would benefit from being organized thematically instead of chronologically or by focusing on a handful of the biggest personalities.
Brad Fox
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBeautifully written and beautifully made, The Bathysphere Book is a piece of poetic nonfiction that strives to conjure up the crushing blackness of the midnight zone ... Reveling in scientific language that is descriptive to the point of inscrutability, Fox devotes chapters to oddities from the history of deep-sea exploration, which take on the surreal quality of the rhapsodic passages of Moby-Dick.
Reid Mitenbuler
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMitenbuler paints Freuchen as the rare explorer who saw the world’s remote corners not as territory to be conquered but as a place to call home. Although narratively clumsy, it is a charming portrait of a man who traveled the world with an open mind ... This second half of his life could have been covered in a few chapters or even a lengthy epilogue, but Mitenbuler stretches it out for almost 200 pages. Even so, Wanderlust is a compelling introduction to one of the most charismatic explorers to ever cross the ice.
Buddy Levy
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewA sickening, terrifying tale ... Levy...writes beautifully about the cold. His Arctic is fearsome and sublime, his ice a living thing ... The sinking of the Karluk comes about a third of the way through the story. What follows is hundreds of pages of agony and terror, tempered by fleeting moments of hope and joy ... It is an ugly tale, very well told. The only beauty is in the ice — and that is as cold as beauty can be.
Sam Knight
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a story both elegant and eccentric, cleanly capturing that brief moment in the 1960s when extrasensory perception verged on mainstream acceptance. It is also quietly terrifying, a reminder that even those who can see the future have no hope of getting out of its way.