RaveAir MailFleming’s books are spare, fast-paced, and better written than you might expect. But they are shot through with sadism, cruelty, and revulsion at non-Anglo-Saxons. They make you wonder about the author. (The standard photo of Fleming—insouciant, with cigarette holder—is not reassuring.) Within bounds, a modern writer needs some freedom ... With a Mind to Kill is Horowitz’s third Bond novel, and the most ambitious in this trilogy. Whether ambition is an asset will be a matter of taste ... Horowitz is a master of quick portraiture ... With a Mind to Kill is one of the best-written Bond novels ever published. It’s also one of the more ambitious: It tries to get inside Bond’s head, and in fact it needs to ... One can ask: How three-dimensional do we want 007 to be? His existence as a cipher is itself a dimension, mysterious and seductive.
Fintan O'Toole
RaveThe AtlanticO’Toole’s sweeping, intimate book...is in a category all its own, a blend of reporting, history, analysis, and argument, explored through the lens of the author’s sensibility and experience ... astonishing in its range. Every chapter takes up a specific topic ... The chapters move forward chronologically. What unites them all is O’Toole’s moral presence and literary voice: throughout, a sly, understated humor; when needed, passion and even anger. In the end, surveying what Ireland has become during his lifetime, he manages an optimistic note, one that is not merely asserted but earned ... I came away from We Don’t Know Ourselves seeing modern Ireland more convincingly portrayed and explained than ever before.
Hugh Howard
RaveAir Mail... smart and immensely readable ... One of the merits of Howard’s book is the way it broadens to encompass Gilded Age culture at its pinnacle.
Ranulph Fiennes
PositiveAir MailFiennes...uses this personal history to inform our understanding of Shackleton’s triumphs and ordeals ... He is familiar with the Shackleton literature and the many controversies, but his book is not a \'last word\' biography, dense with scholarly apparatus. Think of Fiennes, rather, as an Edwardian raconteur with veiny cheeks and a plummy growl who pours you a dram and pulls you close to the fire. He displays a hearty faith in Burberry and blubber and a schoolboy’s delight ... If the listener by the fire were to indulge an occasional rolling of the eyes, the movement would be arrested by the sight of the speaker’s fingertips, several of which happen to be missing. Fiennes did the amputation himself after frostbite turned them gangrenous.
Robert A. Gross
PositiveAir Mail... rich and revealing on every page, but it is also a doorstopper. The ideal place to read it might be a cabin in the New England woods, perhaps near a pond, and maybe over the course of a long winter. And it would help if someone brought you your meals.
Julian Sancton
RaveAir Mail... enthralling and beautifully written ... Sancton adds vivid touches ... Think of it as Masterandcommanderpiece Theater. For anyone in the throes of pandemic self-pity, this book will provide perspective, perhaps even serve as a restorative. Like a penguin.
Ritchie Robertson
RaveAirmailThere’s a certain kind of book that defies a direct approach. It arrives on the doorstep, several inches thick, dense with learning ... Ritchie Robertson’s thousand-page The Enlightenment , a beautifully written account of a period that everyone has heard of but few pause to think about ... Robertson is not uncritical, but he takes issue with, or qualifies, these and other charges leveled at those he calls \'Enlighteners,\' a catchall term that includes everyone from the grand thinkers—Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, Hume—to agrarian reformers and village autodidacts ... One may wish that the book had been sold by the morsel—as shavings of truffle rather than total bulk weight. That said, alongside Diderot it seems compact. And Robertson has divided the book into a hundred or so mini-chapters, each an anecdote-inflected essay that slots into a larger framework.
Douglas Boin
PositiveThe Atlantic... a smart book for the general reader ... It is hardly Douglas Boin’s fault that the balance in his narrative between \'the man\' and \'his times\' is no balance at all. The scales tilt heavily toward Alaric’s times—a rich subject in its own right—and Boin renders the confusion of the era without replicating that confusion in his prose. Alaric can never emerge as a fully three-dimensional figure, but in Boin’s hands he is lifted convincingly from the realm of brutish caricature ... not a polemic. It never invokes modern times explicitly. But the linguistic anachronisms are inescapable. Intended perhaps to be slyly allusive, they come across as winks.
Bart D. Ehrman
PositiveAir Mail[Ehrman] is a fine writer who shuns theological jargon and knows how to bring himself, very occasionally, into the story ... Ehrman bears no animus toward religion—not for him the snark and dudgeon of a Richard Dawkins. He does not accept the visions of the afterlife he explores, but rendering a verdict is not his task. His aim is to describe how the ideas arose, and to show that the impulse behind them is rooted in our earthly lives.
Timothy Egan
PositiveAir MailPilgrimages are by nature unpredictable and picaresque. The days unfold. The weather changes. Plains give way to mountains. The past is everywhere present—centuries, millennia. Every few miles yields a chance conversation with a stranger. Many episodes prompt excursions by Egan into reflections on religion, theology, the inner life. These are not his truest gift. His greater gift lies in recounting the episodes themselves—where serendipity has brought him ... Sometimes in A Pilgrimage to Eternity, Egan really is just kidding. And sometimes he is not.
