MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewJunger makes an effort to frame their project—\'a 300-mile conversation about war\' and why it’s so hard to come home—which is more or less what happens in the film. That’s not what happens in the book. Here, we pass through countryside, nearly all of it in south-central Pennsylvania, and don’t hear a word from anyone till the second half. Freedom has a different purpose, a frame far less explicit ... virtually nothing happens outside the author’s head ... But the cleansing march disappears entirely for most of this short book. Junger takes us on long detours through history, anthropology, primatology, boxing, poker. It’s not easy to follow the thread ... Freedom has an authority problem. That is, its own authority is undercut by breathtaking generalizations and improbable mind-readings ... These contentions read like wild guesses or sentimental projections, and they reflect the book’s structure, which feels both aimless and overdetermined. An afterword of sources and references lists a great many books and interviews, but it comes too late to solve the authority problem.
Nicholson Baker
MixedThe New York Review of BooksA Moleskine notebook is mentioned, and yet Substitute reads like a lightly curated, benign surveillance tape, somehow capturing all the downtime, chaos, non sequiturs, and lost-in-the-infosphere weirdness of a modern American schoolroom … His story here is morally complex and exhausting, and the subjectivity of the teacher-narrator colors every line. And yet the reality of the kids demands a maximum of attentive transparency, which means a minimum of writerly flourish. What’s required is less eye-as-a-camera than a perfectly pitched ear and a high emotional IQ. Baker has these in spades, and with them captures the flow of banter, amusement, squabbling, dire boredom, perfectly pitched demotic speech, small lurches of actual learning, and scenes of minor heartbreak that fill a school day. What he doesn’t have is developed characters, and that’s because he’s a substitute who rarely sees the same kids twice.
