PanThe Guardian (UK)DiAngelo suggests that the animosity of many progressives towards her first book underlines that fragility – a failure to own either the power or vulnerability inherent in racial privilege ... The author’s style is to combine typically condescending accounts of her own encounters with white progressives (often while in the role of trainer and facilitator of anti-racist workshops across the US) with analytical exposition. Throughout the book, she assumes the role of an omniscient narrator of anti-racist truth, which grates ... she describes situations in which she herself does all of these things and without any sense of irony or awareness ... There’s a sense of deep internal contradiction running through DiAngelo’s writing that emerges from such discrepancies and which is at odds with the wealth she has accrued as an authority on anti-racism.
Olivia Laing
PositiveThe Observer (UK)... compelling ... Deftly grappling with Reich’s failures alongside his \'obviously more fertile ideas\', Laing charts the impact of his ideas on her own life and values, and finds a line connecting the revolutionary impulse of Reich to the emancipatory movements of feminism, gay liberation and US civil rights that shaped the second half of the 20th century.
Scott Weidensaul
RaveThe Guardian (UK)I’m not a birder, but Weidensaul persuades me that I could be, and that a greater appreciation of the movement and behaviour of migratory birds might bring me into closer contact with what it means to be a living thing on Earth ... A master storyteller who is also profoundly involved in scientific ornithology, Weidensaul is an active field researcher and has authored more than 30 books ... Weidensaul communicates so much joy in the sheer act of witnessing and such exhilaration in the advances of the science behind what he sees, that we are slow to grasp the extent of the ecological crisis that he outlines ... What emerges is an emphatic statement of confidence in nature’s resilience – a vision of nature as a force that we and our science are irrefutably a part of.
Philippe Sands
RaveThe Guardian (UK)\"This is a taut and finely crafted factual thriller, reminiscent in density and pace of John le Carré ... the mesmerising story, both of an extraordinary love that bound Charlotte and Otto and that endured even as their world was brought to ruin and a forensic investigation ... Sands is unflinching, though, where Horst cannot be. He pursues the details and we are left with the unsettling, discordant portrait of a man who is conceivably a passionate husband and devoted father, but irrefutably a war criminal with blood, including that of Sands’s own family members, on his hands. It’s treacherous terrain, but in Sands we have an incomparable guide who finds a kind of redemption on every road of the human experience, though never at the expense of responsibility or truth. The outcome is a feat of exhilarating storytelling—gripping, gratifying and morally robust.
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Arundhati Roy
RaveThe Guardian (UK)In spite of what she describes in Azadi, her latest collection of essays, as an atmosphere of \'continuous, unceasing threat\', Roy has refused to back down and this volume, which takes its title from the Urdu word for \'freedom\' – azadi is the chant of Kashmiri protesters against the Indian government – serves to keep the Kashmiri situation in the minds of her global readership ... The passion and beauty of her voice is unabated, but what comes through in this volume, too, is a new sense of maturity in both her execution and engagement as she comes to terms with her vocation and the choices she has made ... What [Roy] has produced, in Azadi, is precisely such a text – the outcome of a life of writing from the frontline of solidarity and humanism, and from a writer who is perhaps only now reaching the height of her literary powers.
Isabel Wilkerson
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)The approach [Wilkerson] takes is both persuasive and unsettling ... But the case Wilkerson puts forward is inspiring and hopeful. Her writing incorporates and reflects the anti-racist traditions embodied by figures such as African American liberationist WEB Du Bois and the trailblazer of India’s Dalit movement, Bhimrao Ambedkar, who wrote: \'Caste is [just] a notion; it is a state of mind.\' Like him, Wilkerson wants us to recognise that caste can be dismantled, setting everyone free.
