PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIf Ms. Treska preaches half as well as she practices, her students are lucky. She has a talent for a sweet turn of phrase.
McKay Coppins
MixedThe Washington PostHow satisfying is the full 400-page meal? It’s occasionally interesting and often a little bland, like Romney himself ... Romney’s prodigious and at times cloying self-awareness is very much on display in this book, which feels more like a ghostwritten autobiography than a biography of record. Romney shared a vast trove of his personal email and much of his personal journal with Coppins, a fellow Mormon ... One downside of Romney: A Reckoning is the reckoning part ... The biggest disappointment in this book proves to be Romney himself. I’ve been a fan, indeed voted for him twice, but the book made me less of one.
Colin Dickey
MixedThe Wall Street JournalTimely ... Mr. Dickey is a lively writer, and it’s interesting to read how similar conspiracy tropes resurface throughout history ... Mr. Dickey has a penchant to assign all conspiracy imaginings equal weight ... There are moments, too, when Mr. Dickey’s rhetoric seems to leap ahead of reality.
RaveWall Street Journal[Lange] considers the all-too-familiar retail and \'lifestyle centers\' to be \'ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study.\' She then proceeds to examine them, thoroughly, seriously and in an engaging fashion ... A particular strength of Ms. Lange’s book is her canny appreciation of the mall’s resilience ... Ms. Lange’s elegant conclusion: The mall is dead; long live the mall.
Hugh Howard
RaveThe Wall Street JournalArchitects of an American Landscape, a readable, intelligently paced dual biography, is the literary equivalent of a rolling, Olmstedian greensward. By the final chapter, the reader fully appreciates the short, productive life of Richardson (1838-86), whom Henry Adams, the intimate of senators and presidents, called \'the only really big man I ever knew.\' The Olmsted material feels like a welcome bonus, with erudite retellings of his conservation work in the Yosemite Valley, his pioneering efforts in forestry management for the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, and of course his many collaborations with Richardson ... There is one question that Mr. Howard doesn’t answer satisfactorily: Why has the Richardsonian aesthetic faded so quickly? Why does the author’s beloved subject so need resurrection? ... excellent ... Mr. Howard makes a strong case that we should give Richardson’s prodigious accomplishments an educated second look.
Ariel Sabar
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... mesmerizing ... By the end of the book, one feels sorry for Ms. King, not so much because a con man gulled her but because, from the universe of journalists who might have covered this story, she drew Mr. Sabar. Pursuing the King-Fritz drama, he left no stone unturned...His conclusion is devastating ... delectable melodrama. There are dozens more surprises in his five-act play than in this brief appreciation. Savor the denouement—and don’t leave at intermission.
Benjamin E. Park
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIn Kingdom of Nauvoo, historian Benjamin E. Park has a wild story to tell ... Mr. Park is a smooth writer and a careful historian—at times, too careful—who is blessed here with an overabundance of fascinating material ... Mormon historians have finally come to grips with polygamy in the past quarter-century, and Mr. Park isn’t bringing much new to the table here. If anything, he sounds slightly protective at times ... Mr. Park adeptly describes [Joseph] Smith’s cautious acceptance of female authority on the frontier and Brigham Young’s reactionary rejection of it ... Mr. Park is sharp and unsparing in his account of the church’s initial acceptance, and later humiliation, of its very few black members during the Nauvoo era and its aftermath ... Too often, Mr. Park seems to be pulling his punches when describing [Smith].
Lizabeth Cohen
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... kudos to Harvard professor Lizabeth Cohen for exhuming the cantankerous, ambitious and idealistic Logue in her charming and successful biography-cum-urban affairs history ... Ms. Cohen ennobles his life story, telling it as an impassioned crusade for things that sound old-fashioned now but were and are worth caring about: racial and socioeconomic integration of neighborhoods; respectable public housing for lower-income Americans; and social services and decent schooling for all ... Ms. Cohen is respectful but not worshipful toward the \'complicated character\' who is her protagonist...But she mentions these shortcomings only when they contribute to her story.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
PanThe Wall Street Journal...an overlong, equivocating rehash of early Mormon history mainly composed of women’s and men’s diaries. What could have been a spirited tale of domination and defiance too often reads like a bloodless recitation ... One longs for a badly behaved historian calling out the fraudulent iniquities faced by female Saints throughout church history. Readers, and Mormon women, remain the poorer for it.
Gay Talese
PanThe Boston GlobeLike a Playboy bunny’s pneumatically enhanced breasts, the book is tumescent with titillating filler. There is a separate chapter dedicated to the Polaroid camera, which is really just a pretext to include a few pages about a young woman masturbating ... Disingenuously, Talese treats us to Foos’s drab social and political commentary, again as a pretext to shoehorn in more sex scenes ...The problem is that Foos isn’t Michael Herr; he’s not Daniel Bell; for heaven’s sakes, he’s not even Gay Talese! ... Basically you can’t trust the 84-year-old Gay Talese to get his facts straight, which is a sad end to a remarkable career. It is also sad that this silly, over-inflated book manages to have even less 'content' than the magazine excerpt, which is barely one-fifth its length.
