RaveThe New RepublicMcEwan sketches a scarily plausible dystopia, in which Civilization hasn’t ended; after decades of hanging by a thread it has stabilized, salvaged by our weary successors who are forever bound to pay for our excesses … The world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane.
RaveThe New RepublicThe world of What We Can Know is one of threadbare survival and epistemological doubt. It’s a book about the failure of understanding, and it reads like the work of a man who has accepted that no form of mastery, literary or otherwise, will save us. Yet the mastery is there for all to see: McEwan’s prose has never been looser or more humane ... Continue we must; the future McEwan envisions is grim but not loveless ... McEwan’s despair and his faith: despair that human artifice has supplanted the natural world, faith that it might still bear witness to the loss.
Matthew Desmond
RaveThe New RepublicA shattering account of life on the American fringe, Evicted shows the reality of a housing crisis that few among the political or media elite ever think much about, let alone address. It takes us to the center of what would be seen as an emergency of significant proportions if the poor had any legitimate political agency in American life.
