PositiveThe Boston Globe... the country’s first family will always be the Adamses ... But one of the many useful reminders in David S. Brown’s new biography...is that this particular dynasty ended not with a bang or even a whimper but something far stranger: It ended with a writer ... The book proceeds less day by day than idea by idea, theme by theme, and this approach works particularly well with Adams’s flaws. There’s his well-known anti-Semitism, of course, but also his views on race. Brown’s brisk asides on the Free-Soil movement and the stubborn persistence of slavery in the North make it easier to evaluate Adams’s early writings during the Civil War ... a vital guide to understanding the before, the after, and the messy, never-quite-completed change.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
RaveSF Gate...perhaps the best literary journalist writing today ... If anything holds Pulphead together...it\'s this sense of porousness between culture and reality, between the entertaining and the everyday ... Through tender scrutiny, he finds something fresh to say about over-profiled subjects like Michael Jackson and Axl Rose. He also makes startling, revealing comparison ... Most of all, he consistently mines deeper meanings from his topics ... Sullivan manages to be hilarious without being cruel or cheap ... It all adds up to one of the most honest and humane reflections on faith and doubt you\'d ever care to read ... Pulphead adds up to a terrifyingly versatile book. The other thing holding it together, in addition to its pop-cultural awareness, is Sullivan\'s persona - a highly adaptable, highly rhetorical construct that changes depending on the task ... Sullivan doesn\'t even bother with a short introduction to this book. Instead, he simply pairs his careful, deliberate observations with a sincere desire to understand. It\'s literary nonfiction practiced at the highest level.
Roger D. Hodge
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleThe identity of Texas, and Texans, rests at the center of Hodge’s appealing and unusual new book, Texas Blood ... By writing and reporting Texas Blood, Hodge aims to fix that. His book aspires to the tradition of Joan Didion on California and Ian Frazier on the Great Plains, and it mostly succeeds. Texas comes with a thick overgrowth of symbol and myth: rodeos, oil rigs, the Alamo. Hodge sets it all aside. He’s not interested in chipper \'rise of Texas\' histories, nor in odes to the Texan character — two genres favored by writers who, in Hodge’s nice and knifing phrase, play the role of \'professional Texan\' ... Hodge’s desire to counter this tradition does wonders for the scope of his book, which toggles between his family and the state’s forgotten history... Hodge writes carefully and elegantly, but sometimes his book bogs down under a mix of meandering prose and maximalist detail; in a few stretches there are so many asides they stop feeling like asides.
Kevin Powers
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleFor the most part, The Yellow Birds does a superb job of balancing the impersonal (war) and the personal (us). ‘I'd been trained to think war was the great unifier,’ says John Bartle, the young private who narrates the novel … Powers' theorizing can sometimes get a bit heavy, his writing a bit writerly, but only sometimes. Besides, his details always make up for it: the way Murph's mom, when she visits during basic, has smudges of makeup on her wrists from wiping away the tears; the way the soldiers share ‘a can of care-package Kodiak’; the way the bodies in Baghdad accumulate, ‘faces puffed and green, allergic now to life’ … While The Yellow Birds is not quite a classic, it is a wonderful book.
David Finkel
RaveThe Christian Science Monitor...a stunning, moving, subdued masterpiece of a book … It’s a good thing Finkel is so compelling since he deals with subjects that are complex and grim … Thank You for Your Service takes us to a numbing roundtable where four-star generals scrutinize this month’s military suicides, which occur at a rate nearing one per day. It shows a war widow on the day she finally moves out of the house she’d shared with her husband. It describes the routine one forgetful soldier must follow simply to make it to work.
David Foster Wallace
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleAfter 65 pages of [character sketches], The Pale King arrives at its ‘Author's Foreword.’ There, in a voice that comes closest to Wallace's celebrated nonfiction, a character named ‘David Wallace’ insists that we've really been reading a ‘vocational memoir,’ disguised as fiction for legal reasons. This lets Wallace riff on our age's lack of filters and boundaries … If Infinite Jest diagnosed a problem, The Pale King reaches for a solution. Wallace completed only one of these books, but they both work as well as anything in the past two decades of American literature.
