Serhii Rudenko tr. Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova
MixedThe Guardian (UK)... the question still remains: who is Zelenskiy and what is he really about? Those looking for answers to the Zelenskiy enigma will be disappointed by this hastily written and translated book, which bills itself as \'A Biography\'. Written by Serhii Rudenko, a Ukrainian political commentator, it’s not really a life story, but an account of his eventful three years in office ... Actually, that makes it sound a more coherent narrative than it is. Part of the problem is that it’s written for a Ukrainian audience, people who are aware who Garik Martirosyan and Olena Malyashenko are. An added difficulty is the tone, which is often gossipy, knowing, sardonic and sometimes scathing, but in ways that it would require a working knowledge of the Ukrainian political scene to appreciate ... The takeaways from this uneven book are that Ukraine is a flawed democracy and that Zelenskiy, despite his reformist rhetoric, is a product of the system. But he’s hugely preferable to his adversary and if Ukraine manages to resist Putin’s attempt to drag it back into the Russian empire it will in no small way be down to a leader with the strength of character to rise to the daunting moment.
Henry Kissinger
MixedThe GuardianAs is evident from the subtitle, Six Studies in World Strategy, Kissinger, the geopolitical guru, is most interested in how leaders act on the world stage rather than, say, if they lie to their parliaments or transgress their own laws...At the heart of his political outlook is the notion of strategy, and that in turn is informed by a concept of national interest and power relations that hasn’t changed much since the mid-17th century and the Westphalian settlement...As such, his portrait of Nixon is predictably sympathetic, while not hiding some of the man’s notable character flaws...Unsurprisingly, he hails his efforts in foreign policy, which were all but indistinguishable from Kissinger’s own...The world, viewed through Kissinger’s eyes, is not so very different from the kinds of inter-house machinations dramatised in Game of Thrones, and you could picture him as the Hand of the King, forever whispering fiendish plots and dark truths to a paranoid master...The most finely drawn portrait of the six is of De Gaulle...If a vital aspect of leadership is self-belief, then few leaders have ever displayed more of it in less auspicious circumstances...You sense that Kissinger, who has never undersold himself, admires De Gaulle’s gall, but it’s his statecraft that most commands his respect: \'On every major strategic question facing France and Europe over no fewer than three decades, and against an overwhelming consensus, De Gaulle judged correctly\'...That’s a large claim, but then Kissinger prides himself on being able to see the grand sweep of history, undistracted by minor diversions.
Clare Mac Cumhaill
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Metaphysical Animals lacks the narrative discipline of Wittgenstein’s Poker, and as a result is a baggier and less clearly defined book ... The four women all committed to establishing themselves as philosophers, and sought to refute Ayer and his ilk. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do attempt to explain how they did this, but too often the arguments are lost under a welter of descriptions of daily life in Oxford ... If you want to know what colour of silk cushions and bedspread Foot had in her rooms near Somerville College, then this is the book to read ... But the general reader interested in the subject may wish that it devoted the same care to dealing with philosophical definitions ... Even within its own defined terms, Metaphysical Animals isn’t entirely convincing in making its case. It’s hard to get an objective sense of where these four women stood in terms of influence in the greater scheme of philosophy.
Francis Fukuyama
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... a thoughtful critique but ultimately a stalwart defence of liberalism ... urgent and timely ... His exegesis of critical theory from Marcuse through to Foucault, and how it has been widely adopted as a tool of sociopolitical analysis, is a brilliantly acute summary of the way some aspects of liberal thought have consumed themselves ... Although he outlines some familiar complaints about social media monopolies and their baleful effect on political discourse, the overall sense you gain from this book is that liberalism is in crisis because of the complacency that set in with its successes. Liberal democracy has delivered on many fronts, but with each step forward it left many constituencies behind ... This book does not supply all, or enough, of the answers. But it’s a good place to start with asking the essential questions.
Carlo Rovelli
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... a series of finely wrought essays that draw on an impressive hinterland of cultural and scientific learning ... a rather moving meditation on the nature of an octopus’s consciousness that could make even the most devoted pescatarian hesitate before ordering a dish made from our shockingly underrated eight-limbed friends ... The essay format makes for an entertaining and enlightening journey through a wide field of disciplines, which, thanks to Rovelli’s authoritative voice and clarity of thought, never seems random or disjointed ... What also holds the pieces together is Rovelli’s perspective as a classic European liberal leftist humanist. It’s an attractive political sensibility, particularly in these strange days, and provides a welcome moral framework to much of the writing. But sometimes it lapses into eloquent or even just plain platitude, particularly when the author states his beliefs in bald terms: collaboration is better than conflict, social inequality is bad and war should be avoided ... Set against his almost effortless appreciation of ideas, this stripe of prefabricated idealism can seem politically simplistic.
David Hendy
MixedThe Observer (UK)Hendy...does set the scene rather well of these three influential figures at the dawning of what would turn out to be this country’s biggest and most significant cultural institution. The reader is prepared for a dramatic tale of innovation and determination as the trio succeed in establishing their new business amid a hostile and powerful Fleet Street resistance. Yet no sooner does Hendy introduce these characters than they largely slip out of the narrative. Instead, an array of other functionaries appear and pretty soon Lewis is gone, the BBC has become a corporation and listening to the radio has shifted from an obscure hobby for the wealthy to a national pastime. Exactly how that transformation takes place is lost in an abundance of information that never quite forms into a dynamic narrative. The book is an authorised history, insofar as the BBC has made its archives available to Hendy, though, as he emphasises, without any editorial control or influence. Yet there is nevertheless a sense of obligation in the writing, a need to cover the ground, even when it’s not that interesting or new ... [a] conscientious but rather pedestrian history.
David Graeber and David Wengrow
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... richly provocative ... The histories they weave are fascinating, bringing to light extraordinary illustrative characters such as Kandiaronk, the brilliant Native American Huron-Wendat chief who confounded French Jesuits with his powerful debating skills. Yet there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest ... All the same, the strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions ... It is, in the end, an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature.
Steven Pinker
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Among other things, Rationality is also a response to these critics, a reaffirmation of critical thinking against the encroachments of critical theory ... It’s hard to argue against Pinker’s own logic, yet there will always be a ghost in the machine, those urges and instincts that serve to distort reality ... In the end, though, rationality is all we have to prevent the world from descending into chaos or tyranny. You can’t argue against it – other than by rational means, which would be self-defeating. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be rational to underestimate the lure of the irrational.
Niall Ferguson
PanThe Observer (UK)... like someone who doesn’t want to let a moment’s research go unused, he crams the book with a dizzying array of theories, characters and references that, while sometimes informative and occasionally amusing, combine to a deadening effect ... In vain does the reader search through Ferguson’s impressive breadth of learning for a compelling structure or argument that might make sense of the information overload. As if to make that job even harder, two-thirds of the way through the book, Ferguson starts writing about contemporary events as they’re unfolding. He acknowledges the limitations of this endeavour, as a historian, but suggests the chapter should be read as a diary...It’s no such thing, but instead an extended piece of opinion journalism that doesn’t really add much to our understanding of the pandemic, while showing that Ferguson is no better at prediction than the scientists he takes to task ... not easy to decipher.
Patrick Radden Keefe
RaveThe Observer (UK)... a work of nonfiction that has the dramatic scope and moral power of a Victorian novel ... Keefe paints devastating portraits of the main Sacklers, their greed, pride and monumental sense of entitlement ... a gripping tale of capitalism at its most innovative and ruthless that Keefe tells with a masterful grasp of the material. Purdue Pharma promised a life free of pain. But as the author notes, while the company knew everything about how to get people on to OxyContin, they seemed to have little idea of, or interest in, how to get them off it.
Jordan B Peterson
MixedThe Guardian (UK)It’s hard to resist the conclusion that 12 Rules for Life was a self-help book that left its author in exactly the kind of hopeless state to which it promised to be an antidote. However, Peterson appears unbowed by the experience, for Beyond Order, which is subtitled 12 More Rules for Life, continues in much the same vein. This time the writing is perhaps more laboured, and the arguments undoubtedly more familiar. Like the first book, it’s full of a messianic passion that can read like an unironic homage to Nietzsche ... If Peterson doesn’t excel as a literary critic, he is much more enlightening as a clinical psychologist. One of his strongest arguments is that therapy continues to repeat the same fundamental error of its founders by searching within people’s life stories for solutions to problems that exist outside in the world of complex social relations ... Critically minded readers can come to their own conclusions about which course the publisher took with its multimillion-selling author.
Francisco Goldman
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Faced with this extraordinary melange of ingredients, Goldman could have been forgiven for slipping into the narrative liberties of magical realism. Instead, he has produced a piece of well-researched non-fiction that explores the political conspiracy to murder Gerardi in detail that seems irrefutable ... The benefit of this approach is that it brings a cool eye to the demented workings of a state in which even street drunks are paid informers. But Goldman\'s concern to follow every lead and double-check every story only serves to complicate what is already a fiendishly twisted plot ... Perhaps out of a determination to forgo the tricks of fiction, Goldman doesn\'t offer us a reassuring hero. More likely, there simply wasn\'t one. In fact, there are few vivid portraits, just sketches of individuals, some less flawed than others, who try to do their jobs ... though Goldman allows himself to intrude in the story here and there, he largely remains an off-stage observer ... With the investigation crawling into its sixth year, I longed for Goldman to step back and show us Guatemala from a different perspective, one unaffected by the crime ... In one of his rare moments of poetic reflection, he writes of an overwhelming sadness that possessed him one day while sitting in his car ... a commendable book that should be a required text for all those with an interest in Guatemalan or Central American politics.
Bradley Garrett
MixedThe Observer (UK)Whether from sympathy (Garrett admits to his own prepper instincts) or academic discipline, the author displays a great deal more tolerance for the cast of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, libertarians and hucksters he encounters than many readers might possess. In my narrow-minded case, I find I rapidly lose interest in someone’s opinions the moment they declare that 9/11 was an inside job ... However, when Garrett gets an earful of Truther nonsense, he doesn’t rush to judgment. And he hears a lot of that kind of talk as he visits various bleak bunker sites across America, all of which promise to keep out the coming apocalypse.
Rutger Bregman
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Bregman has a Gladwellian gift for sifting through academic reports and finding anecdotal jewels. And, like the Canadian populariser, he’s not afraid to take his audience on a digressive journey of discovery ... despite the almost bewildering array of characters and information, Bregman never loses sight of his central thesis ... There’s a great deal of reassuring human decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity encompasses both ... There will always be a battle between our altruistic and selfish instincts, our openness and our protectiveness – it is the very stuff of human drama. Still, if the devil has all the best tunes, it makes a welcome change to read such a sustained and enjoyable tribute to our better natures.
Malcolm Gladwell
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... there are all manner of definitional and cultural issues through which Gladwell boldly navigates a rather convenient path. But in doing so he crafts a compelling story, stopping off at prewar appeasement, paedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to a somewhat pat conclusion ... seldom less than a fascinating study of gullibility and the social necessity of trusting strangers.
Florian Huber
MixedThe ObserverHuber retells the self-annihilation of May 1945 in dispassionate, vivid detail, but after a while the sheer repetition of \'ordinary Germans\' ending their lives begins to dull the senses. At around about halfway through the book, he shifts the narrative back to the early days of optimism, when Hitler first came to power. It’s a rather jarring turn in direction that revisits some well-trodden ground, although Huber seeks to find new paths by using the recollections of some of the diarists he introduces earlier in the book. But little new light is shed on what we already know. Nonetheless, reading the testaments of people who’d come through a period of great uncertainty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with the liberal order seemingly spent, it’s hard not to hear faint echoes in our current plight. As they do now, people then craved simple, emotional answers to complex economic and political problems.
Jack Fairweather
RaveThe Observer (UK)There have been many testaments to the cruelties of Auschwitz, but few have followed its development from concentration camp to extermination camp with such gripping descriptive power ... This vivid portrait is of someone who is no way a larger-than-life or conspicuous hero, but instead a man with a remarkable sense of faith, despite the most inhospitable conditions, in human decency ... Pilecki’s tale is well known in Poland, but now finally this towering figure has been brought to the attention of a much wider global audience. Fairweather’s book is an impressive feat of research, organised by a keen moral intelligence and written with the elegance and pace of a first-rate thriller.
Manning Marable
RaveThe ObserverMalcolm has finally received the biography that his unique role in black and global resistance culture demands ... [Marable] has left a meticulous, comprehensive and fair-minded portrait of both Malcolm and the turbulent period of American history in which he lived and died.
Aleksandar Hemon
RaveThe GuardianSuch is Aleksandar Hemon\'s bountiful gift for language that the Bosnian-American writer has drawn comparison with Nabokov, that genius of word selection ... it\'s a sensibility – at once mordant and exuberant, comic and subtle – that Hemon traces to a distinctive Slavic outlook ... a thoughtfully humorous and profoundly sad memoir-cum-collection of essays ... Hemon does with Sarajevo what Orhan Pamuk has done for Istanbul, which is to say he brings to life a city in ways that have little to do with its received image ... [Hemon\'s] beautifully assembled vignettes are often digressive but they invariably come back to a particular point and it\'s usually not the point that you were expecting. Because Hemon, who witnessed the wilful ruination of his famously civilised hometown, knows that life doesn\'t proceed in straight narrative lines ... a writer who knows how to make words succeed in the most unpromising places.
Chris McGreal
PositiveThe Guardian\"... a detailed and compelling account of the spread of opioid addiction across the so-called rust belt, said to be the deadliest drug epidemic in American history ... In many ways, McGreal’s book reads like a white-collar The Wire, with a cast of characters determined to exact as much money as possible regardless of the human cost.\
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
PositiveThe GuardianSummer begins with Knausgaard continuing his encyclopaedic summaries of things and concepts ... electric hand mixers, which, he notes, unlike almost everything else human-made, resemble nothing else in nature ... It’s a charming but head-scratching piece poised elusively between the absurd and the profound—a description that applies to most, if not all, the entries. They can be enjoyed for the ideas and images Knausgaard conjures seemingly out of nowhere, or at least out of such everyday material to which most of us give so little thought that nowhere might as well be their provenance ... He is...endlessly curious about the world. It’s just that his perceptions of it are so particular, and so much the product of his internalized debate, that the world ends up being one vast, if often fascinating, projection of Knausgaard’s restless mind.
Sarah Smarsh
MixedThe Guardian\"But Smarsh’s book never coheres into either a vivid memoir or a damning indictment of America’s growing social divisions. It tries to do both without fully achieving either. The problem is partly because Smarsh, now an academic and journalist, adopts a sentimental structure of addressing the book to the daughter she might easily have had (but didn’t) as a teenager. And it’s partly because the story’s terrain – poor girl works hard and makes good – is dense with cliches, many of which Smarsh doesn’t make enough effort to avoid. There’s a self-romanticising element to the prose that can read like a Bruce Springsteen lyric – all Chevy Caprices and wide-open highways – and men tend to be characterised as either women-beating thugs or salt-of-the-earth heroes ... However, [Smarsh] makes a strong case that it’s both wrong and counterproductive to dismiss the white working class of America’s heartlands as Trump-supporting deplorables.\
David Graeber
MixedThe Observer\"That use of \'tabloid readers\' is revealing of a slightly condescending attitude that Graeber can’t quite suppress. Although his sympathies are with blue-collar workers, who often have \'shit jobs\' (and, of course, may well read tabloid newspapers), he is often contemptuous of white-collar workers with their \'bullshit jobs\' ... With its snarky tone and laboured arguments, I’m not sure this is the book to ignite a larger debate. Despite its length, it doesn’t develop a theory that’s notably more sophisticated than the Strike! essay. Too much time is spent on nailing down flip typologies ... But Graeber is clearly right when he notes that as individuals we crave something more than social acceptance–we also hanker after meaning. He is at his most interesting when he grapples with that age-old economic problem of \'value,\' the idea related to skilled labour that many of us continue to think of as inherently meaningful.\
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe Guardian\"The novel is peopled by free-floating founts of intellectualism, struggling with the social shackles that paradoxically continue to bind them. It’s as if Cusk has wearied of the business of constructing characters in which to place her ideas, as though characterisation were itself a kind of stifling confinement ... Although Cusk is far from a didactic writer (one of Faye’s interviewers helpfully performs the role of a feminist critic), she is intimately concerned with the architecture of women’s lives, the institutions and expectations – marriage, motherhood, loyalty – that continue to shape everyday experiences. But Cusk is too sophisticated a writer to cast women as innocent victims. In Kudos they are more often collaborators and conspirators in their own subjection ... There were times in Kudos when I felt an authorial impatience with the form Cusk has so profitably unearthed, as though something gloriously fruitful was in danger of hardening into a stubborn conceit. But such nagging apprehensions were in the end extinguished by an unsettling and comically primal final scene that, like so much else in these books, will live long in the memory.\
Amy Chua
PanThe GuardianHere she suggests that while America has enjoyed great success as a melting pot, its failures – discrimination, injustice, inequality – stem from this unwillingness to recognise the importance of ethnic and tribal affinities. As far as it goes, that’s a thesis that is unlikely to provoke a storm of dissent for the good reason that it’s large incontrovertible. However, it’s when Chua attempts to expand her argument into the ever more complex world of identity politics that the book begins to lose its way or, rather, the picture blurs into a series of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other hedge … A well-intentioned book that never quite comes together.
Simon Schama
RaveThe GuardianBelonging, which covers the period from 1492 to 1900, is concerned with the Jewish search for security and the efforts – both coerced and voluntary – at assimilation in Europe... Although this is an ambitious doorstop of a book, Schama is not interested in history writ large. His signature method is to recount the plight of individuals against the swirling backdrop of events. It’s a high-wire approach that can leave the reader wondering if the extended anecdotes...maintains the attention with the vividness of his writing and his talent for unearthing gripping figures full of human contradictions ...a narrative that could easily be rendered as a stirring tale of noble victims overcoming mindless victimisation ... Schama is too subtle a writer and historian to succumb to that temptation ...profoundly illuminating book.
Andrew O'Hagan
RaveThe GuardianThe internet has changed us, our means of communication, what we believe to be true, our identities and sense of self. That is a statement of such obviousness that we rarely stop to think about what it all actually means. But Andrew O’Hagan explores these themes with great depth and originality ... Squeezed between two compelling character studies is a relatively short essay entitled 'The Invention of Ronald Pinn.' This Nabokovian-sounding figure is a dead man of around O’Hagan’s age whom the author reanimates online, creating a series of supporting fake identities on social media. It’s a strange, slightly haunting voyage into digital life that reads as much like a short story as an essay. It ends with O’Hagan encountering the dead man’s mother. And suddenly, at the core of this excellent collection, we glimpse the unbridgeable difference between the real and the invented.
John McEnroe
MixedThe GuardianThe second title, while riding on the first, is also a subtle admission that a) it’s more of the same and b) less definitive than the original, which as sports memoirs go was very readable and full of compelling insight into its author’s troubled mind...And so McEnroe rehashes many of the stories from the first autobiography and adds in tales from the seniors circuit. But again, does anyone really care about the seniors circuit? ... we come to that area of McEnroe’s life that has flourished so well post-tennis that he could stake a valid claim to be the new world No 1 in the field: name-dropping. Boy, you could get backache from bending down to pick up all the dropped names that litter these pages ... Yes, he’s sending himself up a bit, but he also wants us to know that Seinfeld lives 'below' him. The brash, insecure kid from Queens once again disproves that old saw about there being no second acts in American life. There are, but as this second autobiography shows, it’s usually just the first act reworked in a new setting.
Ayelet Waldman
PositiveThe GuardianWaldman, who is married to the novelist Michael Chabon, is a smart writer with an easy tone. As a suburban mother of four, she nicely plays up how unlike the archetypal acid tripper she is. The neurological and pharmaceutical science is well handled and she makes a strong case for medicinal LSD. But perhaps what the book does best is demystify the chemical mythology of drugs. Even crystal meth started out as a treatment for depression. As Williams says, there are people who can take it, have an enjoyable time and then continue with their lives. The same is true of heroin and LSD. However, there are also the casualties, those people who should never go near drugs. The sad irony is they are often the ones who are least able to resist them.
Clive James
RaveThe Guardian...a joyfully intelligent appraisal of the major US series – the box sets – that have taken TV to previously unexplored heights over the past decade or two ... James takes a serious, or at least lengthy, look at some remarkable extended pieces of drama. It makes for brilliantly illuminating reading. It’s also very funny. For all his studied perceptiveness and weighty literary references, James possesses an irrepressible comic gift ... what makes these essays so worthwhile is the epigrammatic manner in which they add to the experience of watching or having watched first-rate television.
Larissa MacFarquhar
MixedThe Guardian“Ultimately MacFarquhar can’t decide what she thinks about her subjects’ do-gooding.”
