MixedThe New York Times Book Review... a tender, studious remembrance amid the flurry of \'Rapper Dies\' headlines ... Cantor, working without the cooperation of his subject’s family, makes hay from wide-ranging interviews with the artist’s friends and associates, in addition to the usual trove of media clips ... Cantor makes a fairly persuasive case that for all of McCormick’s later success, he was actually underrated, or at least underestimated, his whiteness an albatross that constantly made him suspect. Smoldering beneath his talents was a mean drug habit...and Cantor, playing up the tragic flaw, is wearyingly fixated on the subject throughout a repetitive book, in which whole chapters can drift by without much new information. Yet we learn almost nothing about the circumstances around his death (bedroom, fentanyl), or its larger context.
David Hoon Kim
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...it can be tempting to read Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost as an immigrant’s tale, a doleful, beautifully written study of the confused yearnings and scars of exile. But the identity crisis here is deeper, roiled by the universal, often doomed impulse to imbue meaning where it no longer exists ... the narrative starts to wander, though confidently, like a tour guide trying not to show that he’s moseyed off route, and one might complain that the whole book is not quite a novel but a collection of tangents, auspicious starts ... Imperfect and meandering, but full of meticulously rendered thinking, Kim’s telling is a fine way out.
