PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAims not to break new scholarly ground but to awaken her audience to the nature, persistence and scale of the threat, along with the insidious ways in which it seeks to disguise itself...[Lipstadt] succeeds ... Lipstadt misses something important by insisting that anti-Semitism \'has never made sense and never will\' ... a book that combines erudition, clarity, accessibility and passion at a moment when they could not be needed more.
Robert D. Kaplan
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHistory has not vindicated every aspect of Kaplan’s thesis ... But his general pessimism about the world that lay in wait in the 21st century now looks remarkably prescient, at least next to the Pollyannaish forecasts ... That’s reason to welcome The Return of Marco Polo’s World, an eclectic collection of elegant and humane essays ... Kaplan makes clear that, at its best, Realism provides American statesmen with a middle path between what Kissinger once called 'the disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation' ... 'Ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little room for private morality,' he argues ... There is much truth in that observation: Foreign policy is not merely a subset of ethics ... When it comes to curbing our enthusiasms, Kaplan’s achievement is to throw so much shade with so much verve.
Matti Friedman
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThis superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something 'the size of a basketball court'—not all of whom survived ... Pumpkinflowers is rich enough to allow different readers to draw their own political conclusions, if they choose to draw them at all. Above all, it is a book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.
