RaveAir MailA feminist reclamation project, filled mostly with admiration rather than judgment. Purnell succeeds in conveying Harriman’s genuine political skills and her interest in using the insider knowledge she gathered, whether whispered in bed or brandished at one of her dinner parties. There is something arguably ruthless in her nature that Purnell doesn’t entirely deal with, but she has brought her subject out from between the sheets and enabled her to stand in her elegant clothes, coiffed hair, and jewels in the naked light of day.
Joyce Carol Oates
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude — sometimes to excess — of much of her earlier work ... Undoubtedly one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse. In the end, though, the purview of the novel is larger than one might think, becoming an empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised. Oates, as is her wont, succeeds in creating a world that is apart from our own yet familiar, making it impossible to dismiss her observations about twisted natures and random acts of violence.
Nathan Hill
RaveThe AtlanticThe book swarms with characters, ideas, and sociological evocations, taking place over several decades ... Hill’s ambition put me in mind of two other 20th-century novelists, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, but Hill is less gnomic than the former and more humane than the latter ... Hill keeps his lofty intentions under his hat; only after one is well into the novel does one begin to realize that there are tales within tales ... Intermittently slides into too-muchness ... All of which is to say that I read Hill’s novel with excitement and close to a sense of disbelief that there is still a writer out there who is intrigued by amplitude and by what fiction can do if pushed far enough. You just have to find the hours to read it in, which might mean skipping a new TV series or two.
Anna Funder
RaveAir MailWonderful, genre-bending ... Funder succeeds in drawing a portrait of O’Shaughnessy...that is vivid and multi-dimensional and ultimately heart-rending.
Rose Styron
PositiveAir MailA signal gap in the memoir, created by Rose’s circumvention of various issues that she is either uncomfortable with or doesn’t wish to go into. One of them is her Jewish lineage, which she seldom alludes to ... A generous-hearted account of a life rich in affection and interest both toward those nearest to Rose and to strangers as well, all of whom reciprocated her feelings.
Szilvia Molnar
PositiveThe AtlanticBring[s] us down from the clouds into the muck and mire of postpartum reality ... The shifts in the narrator’s state of mind are adroitly handled, suggesting the fluid tangle of the real and the imaginary that she is experiencing. Many of her thoughts are deeply disturbing, leaving the reader unclear as to how seriously we are to take them—or, alternately, how seriously the narrator herself takes them ... The Nursery is a powerful brew of a novel, emitting unpleasant sights, smells, and emotions that are rarely captured in print; it is frequently disquieting in its brutal, insistent candor ... Although it cuts back and forth, sometimes a bit confusingly, between the narrator’s life pre-pregnancy, the days she spends in the hospital after delivering the baby, and the harrowing aftermath, the cumulative effect gives the novel a largeness of scope that it otherwise might not have had and saves it from potential claustrophobia. The prose occasionally falters, and a phrase will sound as if it were a mistranslation (the writer was born in Budapest and raised in Sweden, though she is writing here in English), but it is in the main charged with an immediacy and directness that pull the reader in.
Carmela Ciuraru
PositiveAir MailPainful, even incendiary reading ... All the same, these five marriages are very different in the nature of their dysfunctionality and the manner in which a talented woman is subordinated to the talented man she chooses to marry; Ciuraru’s attempt to cluster them together strikes me as a bit forced. Still, the mixture of high gossip and granular detail makes for enthralling reading.
Andrea Wulf
RaveAir MailA protracted dip into heavy waters, where the myriad historical details and internecine intellectual wrangles are as thick as pebbles on the shore ... Wulf recounts the little-known story of a furiously erudite, endlessly fractious, and compulsively gossipy group she calls the \'Jena Set\' ... Andrea Wulf’s breathless, sprawling narrative vividly illustrates what it was like to live in Jena at a time when Goethe wrote in the town’s Old Castle, \'propped up on pillows and wrapped in blankets to keep out the cold, dictating to his assistant\' ... he book could have used some judicious editing—Wulf seems bent on using every morsel of her research (the notes and bibliography come to more than 100 pages), and the prose sometimes becomes cluttered—but Magnificent Rebels is, overall, a vaulting achievement.
Andrew Scull
RaveThe Atlantic... comprehensive, sober, and compulsively readable ... Scull, a sociologist, provides a lucid and, in his own words, \'skeptical\' overview of the field, describing a complex and densely detailed series of developments with skill and little mercy. His empathy, which is considerable, is saved for the stigmatized and frequently dehumanized patients who are too often the victims of psychiatric arrogance as well as of the profit-fixated marketplace ... Scull’s book is an effort to provide a sight line through the often turbulent currents of the field, touching on its strengths and (mostly) its shortfalls, from the start of the psychiatric endeavor to the present moment. His hope, I would suggest, is to provide readers with a way of thinking about people with mental illness as part of us rather than as alien or weird presences, best drugged into compliance or shuttled off to an institution. Understanding the long, sordid history of how these diseases of the mind have been treated is a necessary first step toward bringing people with even the most debilitating disorders into the fold and finding the solutions that might aid in their healing or, at the least, alleviate their suffering ... If Scull’s turbulent history were merely an indictment, it would be a far less powerful document than it is. It’s also a plea for less internecine fighting between the nature and nurture proponents and a greater acceptance of the large gray area that encompasses our inability to fully discern where the influence of biology stops and the influence of environment begins. Scull has joined his wide-ranging reporting and research with a humane perspective on matters that many of us continue to look away from. And understanding these \'desperate remedies” helps to elucidate the psychiatric pathologies to which they were responding.
Nancy Dougherty
MixedThe New York TimesDougherty’s particular contribution is that she has extensively interviewed the feisty and mostly unreflective widow, Lina, who generally ends her revisionist observations with a verbal shrug: \'nicht wahr?\' (wasn’t it so?) ... There is, perhaps because of the successive deaths of both author and editor, a slightly morbid, almost futile feel to this book — as though its subject has outrun the attempt to pin him down ... Dougherty’s account makes for absorbing reading without offering radically new insights into what made Heydrich tick. Although it presents itself as revelatory because of the interviews the author conducted with his wife, Lina Heydrich is too shrewd to be caught in anyone’s net; she is willing to admit to complexities in her marriage and has strong, sometimes witty opinions about other Nazis, but concedes nothing when it comes to the horrific vision her husband embraced...Then again, I would suggest that even the most psychologically astute biography is not equipped to explain the guiltless machinations of ruthless despots: It can never catch the elusive, complex matrix of character and circumstance that creates a Heydrich (or a Putin, for that matter) ... In the end, the reader is left gazing at something that is ultimately inscrutable. Just as actual train wrecks tend to stop us cold because of their apparent inevitability and imperviousness to intervention, moral train wrecks seem to create a similar element of stop-time — a mixture of fascination and paralysis — with no one able to prevent the damage even as the carnage and destruction roll on.
Carl Erik Fisher
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewAlthough Fisher wears his compassion for substance abusers prominently on his sleeve, he is also capable of throwing out some controversial observations that go against received wisdom ... Fisher provides a very detailed history of A.A., much of which information is out there already, and delves into rehab and outpatient programs ... after all the history and analysis he serves up, the original questions about addiction continue to hover in the air without definitive answers ... Although Fisher holds out hope for the \'multiple pathways of recovery,\' he returns at the end of this sprawling, irresolute book to stressing the complexity of addiction and the need for a corrective context of personal responsibility and individual change. How some people get beyond their addiction remains withal mysterious and elusive; it’s not even clear how the author managed to escape his own entrapment ... From the beginning of The Urge, one of Fisher’s primary intentions seems to be to humanize the way we perceive addiction, suggesting that we evince empathy instead of casting blame. This is a laudable goal but it also blurs some of the specific, tougher issues he raises about what role choice plays in what looks to be an innate, helpless predilection; instead of focusing on the problems that come with naming and treating this condition, he offers a survey of everything under the sun that has been thought or done about addiction. The book is something of a tangle as a result and would certainly have benefited from a less amorphous sense of the message, or messages, it wishes to convey. As it is, the situation the author describes looks irremediably bleak: One comes away with the overwhelming impression that the propensity for addiction is part of the human condition, \'the blight man was born for.\'
Roddy Doyle
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book is small-boned and quiet, lacking some of the life force of Doyle’s other writing, but its atmosphere of desolation has its own kind of dark power, and the resilient wit of the Irish is everywhere ... The prose proceeds without fanfare, as is Doyle’s way, but is infused with unexpressed or diverted emotion that lends it an accumulated charge ... My favorite of the lot is The Charger, which is also the longest and the most developed. (A few of the other stories have a slightly dashed-off quality and can veer into cutesy moments or slightly pasted-on endings ... Admittedly, there is something thin about Life Without Children, a certain degree of repetitive emotions and scenarios — almost a quality of having been written at great speed before time runs out on all of us. But that very thinness seems suited in some way to the unimaginable period of isolation and confinement Doyle is writing about, a period to which he imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection that make it less surreal and more a part of the daily vicissitudes through which we must make our way, or perish.
Donald Antrim
MixedBookforumAntrim’s writing has always been spare and indirect, but it is exponentially more so here—close to affectless, as if he were coming at his emotions from a great distance. At its best his prose has a distilled quality, and at its worst it can seem lazy, given to generic descriptions...repetitive adjectives...and declarations that are meant to be succinct but sound a little worn-out ... he prefers to call his depression \'suicide\' because he sees it \'as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation\' rather than \'the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled.\' Although Antrim offers this explanation as an original take on an enigmatic condition, I found it befuddling rather than clarifying: suicide is sudden and immediate while depression is a long and often recurrent illness ... Antrim’s distinction strikes me as more of a rhetorical gambit than an insight ... he offers rapid-fire summaries of psychiatric works by John Bowlby, Erik Erikson, and D. W. Winnicott, which reduce the complexity of their theories to the equivalent of a sound-bite ... His book would have been better served if he had taken us through some of the twists and turns in what are seminal contributions to psychoanalytic theory ... The centerpiece of One Friday is Antrim’s undergoing ECT, also known as electroconvulsive or shock therapy. This is where the book finds its thrust, reading less like a series of arbitrary observations and more like an actual narrative with a perceptible arc ... the memoir is trying to have it both ways, presenting itself on the one hand as an insider report for his devoted following and on the other as a self-help book for a broad readership.
David Grossman, tr. Jessica Cohen
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewGrossman’s evocative gifts are in full force ... reminded me of fiction’s ability to evoke an often intuited but rarely articulated atmospherics of place ... There are many stories within stories in the novel, like concentric circles whirring in the air. Some are underdeveloped...some seem like clanking, superfluous devices rather than intrinsic to the plot...and yet others are alluded to too belatedly and briefly to be successfully integrated into of the novel ... The result is a certain amount of confusion and unnecessary distraction from the main events, yet such is this writer’s skill and generosity of vision that More Than I Love My Life moves beyond its flaws to cast a spell that lingers. Grossman is especially good on women, presenting them as complex and nuanced characters, and his understanding of the opaque ways of love — sometimes subterranean, often unexpected or arbitrary — is unmatched ... David Grossman is one of our outstanding contemporary writers and I have sometimes thought that, despite all the accolades that have come his way, he hasn’t been given his full due because he happens to be an Israeli, although one who is often deeply critical of his country’s actions and moral quandaries. To read him is to understand that there is a world beyond the political, even in these re-tribalized times, one in which there is room for recognition, however incomplete and often painful, of who we are in our own eyes and in one another’s.
Frances Wilson
MixedBookforumThe book is...a pliable construct that bends to the author’s whim, consenting to be led every which way without regard for the conventions of chronology or context. The reader is implicitly held hostage as well, dependent on the biographer’s confidence and skill to steer one through the narrative, which is usually linked by a more or less persuasive conceit. The whole enterprise is a bet against large odds and the payoff can result in an exciting, even revelatory rereading. When the form doesn’t fully work, however, this approach can seem scattershot and contrived, with any fresh insights likely to get lost amid the welter of surrounding facts and details ... Wilson aims to be innovative above all, even if it means making gnomic assertions that sound profound in a sort of Barthesian way at first reading but don’t hold up to a closer parsing ... I was never convinced that the triadic arc she imposes really fits. Nor was I sure it added much to an understanding of the often conflicting forces that impelled Lawrence’s movements ... I found the references to and summations of the Comedy tedious, in addition to which they interrupted the flow of a narrative that was already insistently digressive. There are, without question, areas in which Wilson shines. She is in some ways a Lawrentian-styled explicator of Lawrence ... Wilson frees herself and us from trying to put his parts together, which, paradoxically, allows us to see him in the round ... I would venture that, if the literary fates are kind, Wilson’s unusual and vividly written approach, studded with nuggets of information and riveting quotes, might succeed in bringing Lawrence back around for another look.
Jenny Diski
RaveThe New York Times Book Review[Diski\'s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images ... Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way ... She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion ... in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else ... Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, \'never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.\'” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly ... I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.
Heather Clark
RaveThe New York Times...just as one is wondering whether there can possibly be anything new to be said, here comes Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath hurtling down the chute, weighing in at more than 1,000 densely printed pages ... as Plath and her complex, much analyzed legacy fade with the passing of successive generations, and her work grows more removed from the cultural mainstream, now seems a prime moment to revive her tale and try to bring all of its elements together ... poignant ... Clark is at pains to see Plath clearly, to rescue her from the reductive clichés and distorted readings of her work largely because of the tragedy of her ending ... there is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability. Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry ... Instead of depleting my interest in Plath, the book stimulated it further ... Clark’s talent for scene-painting and inserting the stray but illustrative detail (\'By January 31, the date of her last surviving check stub, she had only 59 pounds\') contributes to create a harrowing picture of the narrow confines of the London that Plath had moved to with such high hopes.
Maggie Doherty
PositiveNew York Review of BooksDoherty focuses on five women: three writers, Kumin, Sexton, and Tillie Olsen; the painter Barbara Swan, who specialized in expressionist portraits dense with texture and emotions; and the sculptor Marianna Pineda, a Brookline mother of three who longed for recognition from an artistic community ... Doherty, despite suggesting that bridging the two spheres is doable with some financial assistance and mutual goodwill, sidesteps the possibility of happy compromise right in her introduction, even before she starts laying out her argument.
Elizabeth Tallent
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... approaches the mysteries, gaps and obstacles in Tallent’s own story with the same psychological precision and elliptical motivation she applies to her fictional characters ... This central blurriness in the midst of hypercharged description, furthered by a non-chronological structure, is both fascinating and confounding. It is also, I think, exactly the tantalizingly elusive effect Tallent intends ... stunningly demonstrates that she no longer believes her own rationalizations ... a subtle and idiosyncratic account that tries to elucidate her decades-long writer’s block even as she recognizes that — as with so much in anyone’s life — she cannot fully grasp it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a memoir quite like this, one that spills its many dark secrets with so little self-pity, so much acuity and such a deliberate lack of authorial certitude.
Helen Garner
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMuch of the book revolves around the disputatious inquiry that constitutes a courtroom trial, the back-and-forth between the prosecutor and the defense lawyers, the questioning and cross-examination of witnesses for both sides. This part is gripping ... There is also a certain amount of tedium that is part of any trial, especially when it involves granular details ... Garner is good at capturing it all, the longueurs as well as the suspense ... Helen Garner is a prodigiously gifted writer, one with many quivers in her bow. This House of Grief is the sort of book Joan Didion might have written if she’d had more of a heart.
Anne Carson
RaveThe New York TimesThe book, in fact, takes as its overt theme what has been the ever more insistent subtext of Carson\'s prior writing -- the \'dilemma of desire\' and the ways in which intellectual discernment (a familiarity, say, with \'the passive periphrastic\' tenses in Latin) and erotic taste often pull in opposite directions ... Carson\'s willingness to implicate herself in the discussion at hand -- her refusal to edit out the personal, even at its most pathetically lovelorn -- has become more obvious with each successive book, and The Beauty of the Husband takes her farther out on the precarious limb she has claimed as her own ... There is far less of the brainy braggadocio that has marked her previous work, especially if one looks beyond the tap-dancing around the Keatsian equation of Truth and Beauty that is invoked in epigraphs preceding each section ... I don\'t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell\'s Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing.
Catherine Lacey
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...this particular book satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses—including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else’s—in a way that, say, Donna Tartt’s more explicitly pitched The Goldfinch decidedly does not ... Nobody is Ever Missing has its longueurs, to be sure, and some of its lineaments seem a bit wobbly—I was never quite persuaded of the reality of Elyria’s New York life. But it is never less than strikingly original. By the novel’s end—which is blessedly free of even a whiff of so-called closure...we have reached the idiosyncratic heart of the human mystery: we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute ... Lacey has written a postmodern existential novel ... I was excited by its sustained attunement to the disjunctive universe its protagonist inhabits, and the way the writer nimbly hop-skips around, cutting squibs of arresting dialogue into the meditative sections and gimlet-eyed details ... Lacey is a very gifted writer and thinker, and if this is what post-wounded women sound like—diffident about the pain of being alive, funny and dead-on about the obstacles to being their best selves—I say bring ’em on.
David Thomson
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"Whether the book works as a whole (I’m not sure it does) seems to me less important than the parts that sum it up, which in Thomson’s case contain more original insights, provocative asides and thought-inducing speculations than several volumes of a less talented writer’s efforts ... In the end, though, Sleeping With Strangers is larger than any of its hypotheses about \'the unease of straight manhood,\' or its obvious points (\'Porn is full of male hatred of women\') — or, again, its sweeping statements, replete with slightly smarmy wordplay ... Thomson is set on linking our frenetic carnality on screen to our vexed carnality in real life, and in doing so he elucidates the cultural impact of film on the shadowy areas of our collective psyche — whether it be gender, racial politics or the male pursuit of power — with an unflinching, sardonic eye ... If it is true that he sometimes substitutes free association for deep thinking and throws out aperçus just to see if they’ll stick, it is also true that Sleeping With Strangers is dazzling in the effrontery of its opinions, even when they don’t quite hold up. Thomson, a stylist extraordinaire, has written an unaccountable and irresistible book.\
Kurt Eichenwald
RaveThe New York TimesA trauma is a trauma is a trauma. Or is it? Over the past decade, the words \'trauma\' and \'traumatic\' have been used so profligately and have entered our cultural discourse to such an extent that they have almost lost their depth-charge, the reactive implosion of psychic damage to which they were originally meant to refer. Everyone in this era is traumatized by everything ... And then along comes a book, like Kurt Eichenwald’s A Mind Unraveled, that makes you rethink not only the concept of trauma but its potential impact—the ways in which trauma can work not only to weaken but to strengthen the character of the person who has experienced it. His...memoir reads, unaccountably, like the most hair-raising of psychological thrillers ... A Mind Unraveled is inspirational in the true sense of the word rather than in a gimmicky, self-help sort of way. It is written with great verve and wisdom by someone who has closely and thoughtfully detailed his own plight as well as the journey out of it.
Claire Tomalin
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe fewest memoirists manage the sort of balancing act that characterizes Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own, which navigates artfully between tantalizing revelations and unobtrusive elisions ... Ms. Tomalin does an excellent job of evoking Cambridge in the early 1950s ... The pleasures of reading this book are many, not least the one of watching as Ms. Tomalin navigates the professional landscape as a strikingly attractive woman in a world of men. She deftly sidesteps offenses of the patriarchy ... I hesitate to call this book enchanting because Ms. Tomalin’s life is strewn with tragedy...but it is certainly an exceptional account, daunting and inspiring at the same time, written with no end of poignancy, humor and perspective.
Yossi Klein Halevi
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...a clarion call, not to arms but to empathy ... So rare is it to hear an uncynical voice on the subject of Arab-Israeli relations that it’s tempting to dismiss this slim but intensely felt book as naive, a soft-hearted offering of the olive branch with no takers in sight. To do so would be a mistake, for Mr. Halevi is a fierce defender of Israel’s sovereignty as well as a clear-eyed observer of Palestinian obstructionism and disingenuousness ... Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor is a profound and original book, the work of a gifted thinker whose allegiance is not so much to a religious or political ideology as to a \'discourse of spiritual dignity.\' It is, in its way, a shot in the dark, and if some readers will question its assumptions and its conclusions, none can question the humanity that characterizes its every page.
Lorrie Moore
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMoore rarely condescends to her subject except when she is writing in a spirit of sophisticated disgust about politics ... She is generous, sometimes to a fault ... Her voice throughout is clear and informed, easily amused, psychologically nuanced and polished without being brocaded ... As might be expected from a stylist as accomplished as Moore, her essays about other writers are intriguing even when the book in question is minor or has been eclipsed by the passage of time — or when you don’t agree with her assessment ... If I have reservations about See What Can Be Done, they have mostly to do with the fact that the collection seems a bit overstuffed ... That said ... I found myself nestling into the book the way one does with the most gripping of novels...curious to read the next essay.
Leslie Jamison
RaveThe New RepublicBy all rights, Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath shouldn’t work ... And yet The Recovering bursts with insight on how we scramble together our identities, told in a voice that manages by some literary legerdemain to be both winsomely idiosyncratic and resoundingly collective ... Although several reviewers have complained that this part of the book lags, I found the disparate sobriety stories of Sawyer, Gwen, Marcus, and Shirley essential to Jamison’s book, serving to widen its scope ... The Recovering creates its own grainy context, defying all the usual tropes of addiction memoirs.
Martin Amis
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"The Rub of Time is divided into 16 somewhat arbitrary sections, the better to corral a wide variety of pieces, and has a yoked-together quality—as it necessarily must have, given that it contains reviews, essays and reportage written over the last 23 years. That said, there is much in this rangy miscellany that sparkles ... There are three pieces each on two of Mr. Amis’s literary idols, Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, which showcase his talents as a close and generous reader ... Mr. Amis is a good enough political journalist and can hold his own as an entertaining, politically incorrect observer. The purely personal contributions, on the other hand, in which he interviews himself via questions submitted to a London paper or recounts his first trip to America at the age of 9, are either insubstantial or annoying; they strike me as an expense of ego in a waste of paper.\
Martin Amis
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"Certitude would seem to be a welcome thing in a critic; it lends his opinions ballast and force. And yet, while reading Martin Amis’s latest collection of essays, The Rub of Time,” I found myself longing for a little less of it, and for a few grace notes of tentativeness, a soupçon of doubt ... One comes away with the feeling that if he focused on the world a bit more and on his image a bit less, oh what a mighty writer he’d make.\
Sylvia Plath, ed. by Peter K. Steinberg & Karen V. Kukil
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"I would go so far as to say that the unabridged nature of this book does Plath a disservice, encouraging even the ardent reader to skim for fear of one’s eyes glazing over at the mention of another frugal purchase or another lyrical description of the weather. Except that at some point—about 200 pages in—the close-up, almost microscopic focus began to exert its own fascination and I found myself caught up in the clean-cut, white-gloved ’50s atmospherics and the emerging facets of Plath’s complex character that together form her strong yet fragilely put-together identity … For anyone familiar with the ins and outs of Sylvia Plath’s life, these letters provide an added gloss to the known contours, tweaking her image without seriously revising it. There is, though, a certain thrill in reading along as Plath the dedicated artist hoves into view.\
Claire Messud
RaveBookforumIt may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages—the novel, candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire, that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own … The Woman Upstairs is an extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward. Messud’s skills are all on display here, but they seem to be in the service of a more heartfelt and profound tale than those she has previously told.
Kay Redfield Jamison
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAlthough her approach to Lowell bears some similarities to Ian Hamilton’s 1982 biography in its detailed immersion in the life, Ms. Jamison’s impassioned advocacy and attempt to understand Lowell’s bipolar experience from the inside out are at a far remove from Hamilton’s dispassionate recounting ... Kay Jamison has provided us with a remarkably poignant, in-depth (and occasionally repetitive) look at the making of art under often hair-raising circumstances. She doesn’t skimp on the damage Lowell caused, both to himself and others, when he was at his worst, which makes the insistent re-emergence of his best self an act worth marveling at, as courageous and full of stamina in its way as that of any war hero.
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat is one to make of The Genius of Judaism? Its emotional logic — which is in part the logic of an unconscious penitent, that of a secular universalist yearning to be a yeshiva bocher, engaged in daily pilpul — goes in one direction and its intellectual logic in another. And yet, even if one doesn’t agree with its predicates or its conclusions, there is a lot here that is genuinely provocative and, on occasion, insightful. If only more time had been spent organizing the book and filling in the context, this effort might have carried greater weight. As it stands now, The Genius of Judaism reads like a trawling manuscript in search of an editor — or, perhaps, a more introspective author.
Saul Friedlander
RaveBookforumIn many ways, Where Memory Leads is a reshaping of the contours of the first memoir, written from the perspective of old age; it is possibly a less artful book but also a richer and more candid one, providing glimpses of the turmoil and conflicts that afflict Friedländer under his public persona and 'the construction of a normal life' ... it's hard to get a sense of his fairly dazzling ascension because he keeps sidestepping his own achievements, picking up just when a juicy job offer comes into view, attributing much of his professional and academic success to 'luck' rather than his own gifts ... Where Memory Leads is an intellectual as well as personal meditation, and among the many pleasures of reading it is the lucid and insightful analysis it provides of the Israeli occupation ... it's a tribute to his consuming honesty and taste for understatement that the reader comes away with a sense of the complexity and hesitancy that marks a life that, in other hands, might have been presented as one long triumphal march.
Mark Greif
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...this collection decodes subjects both Hi and Lo, from the meaning of life and the philosophy of contemporary warfare to the implications of rap and reality television ... There is more than a whiff of the student Marxist in him, but instead of narrowing his view, this slightly censorious impulse lets him see things most of us prefer to overlook ... There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core, even if his prose frequently bristles with abstractions ... In our dumbed-down, social-media-driven age, Against Everything embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable.
Arthur Lubow
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Lubow is unflagging in his effort to understand Diane Arbus and to unravel her many persistent mysteries, including 'the psychological need that had drawn her to photography: the desire not only to see but to be seen.' Diane Arbus is as digressive a biography as I’ve read in a long time, with stops along the way to provide a brief history of, say, New Journalism or to fill in the contours of the lives of Arbus’s women friends, even the ones she barely stayed in touch with. Mr. Lubow might have done the reader a favor by filtering out some of the information he has so assiduously gathered, but his 'more is more' approach also builds on itself as the book goes along, giving you the sense that you are learning about the history of photography as well as about Arbus.
Lavie Tidhar
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewIt would be easy to dismiss this novel, which comes bearing high praise from British reviewers, as an affront to good taste, but that would be to play into its hands. Better, it seems to me, to say that there is something too easy about its provocations, too unearned about its shock effects. [Tidhar] certainly knows his Holocaust, but the uses to which he has put his knowledge are of questionable value, suggestive of little that is enlightening about that catastrophe or the mad genius who set it in motion.
Claire Harman
PositiveBookforum[Harman] comes without intellectual agenda other than her own curiosity; her life of Charlotte doesn’t offer a brand-new perspective so much as a subtle shift in our understanding of this 'little woman,' as her contemporary William Thackeray called her. In the process of conjuring up a Charlotte animated by a zeal to write as well as by intense feelings of love and desire for Constantin Heger, the married professor she studied with in Brussels and eventually fictionalized in both Shirley and Villette, Harman infuses her with an intriguingly modernist spirit ... A Fiery Heart is a welcome and clear-sighted addition to a growing literature, one that respects the impenetrable mysteries that still cling to the female scribes of Haworth while offering a plausible perspective on what made them into quiet revolutionaries of the nineteenth-century novel.
