PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThough peppered with good things and tightly written vignettes, leaves you with an odd feeling of dutifulness shading, at times, into outright constraint.
Philip Norman
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalAbsorbing ... Ravishing detail ... Each part of the book, it should be said, presents its author with its own serious challenge. If Part 1 has Mr. Norman trying to cut the least charismatic Beatle out of the herd and make him a personality on his own terms, then Part 2—when the subject finally emerges blinking into the spotlight—is in some ways even trickier to negotiate. To pore over the last quarter century of Harrison’s life is, in the end, to remark its faint air of desultoriness.
Rebecca Solnit
RaveWall Street JournalThe aerodrome is made ready for one of those dizzying circular flights that Solnit does so well, \'a series of forays from one starting point\' as she defines it, concentrating on a single species of flower \'around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen,\' veering off into all manner of political and socioeconomic byways, but always returning to the man in the cottage garden bent on storing up plenty for the generations ahead ... Ms. Solnit is particularly good on the attempts made by various dictators and their stooges to subordinate nature to their own ideological ends, or to their own personal vanity ... Widely read in Orwell’s work and never afraid to ask awkward questions of him, Ms. Solnit seems especially exercised by the apparent contradiction between a progressive political standpoint and the pursuit of personal pleasure.
