MixedThe AtlanticLeerhsen chooses to view Bourdain chiefly through the lens of his suicide. Throughout the book, different aspects of Bourdain’s life and personality are cast as foreshadowing his end ... By ending on the texts, Leerhsen gives in to salaciousness, undermining what is otherwise a stylized and exhaustively researched celebrity biography. A former editor at Sports Illustrated, Leerhsen has the magazine writer’s ability to put us inside the life of a famous person ... He also makes the interesting choice to focus on Bourdain’s early years, before we knew him. This is a gritty contrast to other recent Bourdain books and documentaries that lean heavily on the proud production-company and celebrity collaborators of his later years ... Whether you are a Bourdain fan or a relative newcomer to his story, you’ll come away with a better understanding of what made the man. Yet sometimes he comes across as a bit too intent on cutting Bourdain down to a more manageable life size ... Leerhsen gets how Bourdain’s vices and neuroses helped him forge a bond with his audience...But Leerhsen is less successful at taking the next step: conveying how—or why—this sort of guy, damaged in many ways, someone who had never really traveled much before hosting a television series, ended up showing us so much ... What’s missing in this new biography is the possibility that the dark backstory Leehrsen tells contributed not just to Bourdain’s suicide but to his unusual empathy: Having known the rock bottom of heroin and crack addiction, the dislocation of not fitting in or feeling comfortable, perhaps Bourdain was better equipped to really see people struggling against forces that were too big for them to control ... Leehrsen has an eye for the devastating detail.
Elizabeth D. Samet
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... magisterial ... there is nobility in celebrating the U.S. victory in a just war and honoring those who served. Samet reaffirms that truth while forcing our attention on a more complicated reality ... The downside of Looking for the Good War is that it occasionally becomes a bombardment of cultural references, as if Samet cannot help finding validation for her arguments everywhere; stretches of the book are devoted to film and book summaries. But the strength of this approach is to remind us that there has always been an alternative to the simplistic mythmaking around World War II and its impact on our national psyche ... And it’s clear that the more recent War on Terror was colored from the outset by World War II’s grip on our national consciousness, even if its reality has tracked closer to the nuanced accounts of war explored by Samet’s canon of countercultural voices.
H R McMaster
MixedThe Washington PostIn it, we learn almost nothing about his interactions with Trump or his personal opinion of the man. McMaster holds up this decision as a virtue, prefacing his book with a brushback statement that amounts to a pox on both houses ... what the book aims to do: the work, in particular, of educating the reader in a manner that makes the case for McMaster’s conventionally hawkish approach to American national security ... With the kind of detail that reportedly caused Trump to sour on him, McMaster takes us on a tour of those parts of the world that, in his view, pose the greatest danger to the United States ... Along the way, there are dense and often rich diversions into the history that shaped each place ... McMaster has an erudite and confident voice, and is at his best when dissecting emerging trends such as Russia’s weaponization of disinformation ... But his insistence on avoiding frank commentary on his former boss undermines the very credibility he is seeking to assert.
