MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewOne of the book’s most compelling sections is about the foundation’s support for family planning ... While Schwab allows that Gates has some good intentions and that the foundation has saved some lives, he documents how it tends to exaggerate or even concoct data about the impact of its work, including widely cited figures about just how many lives it has actually saved ... Schwab makes a strong case, based on years of reporting, that under the direction of a humbler man the Gates Foundation would probably be a more effective force for good ... The problem is that Schwab is rarely content to let the facts speak for themselves. Page after page devolves into insinuation and screeds against capitalism ... I found Schwab’s casual smears of other journalists to be especially distasteful.
John Vaillant
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is a gripping yarn, though the storytelling is at times slowed by Vaillant’s wanderings. There’s a painstaking history of the use of bitumen over the millenniums ... Fire Weather lacks many memorable human characters. But Vaillant fills that void with an unforgettable protagonist: fire itself.
Lyndsie Bourgon
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBourgon puts herself in the poacher’s shoes, and the result is a refreshing and compassionate warning about the perils of well-intentioned but overzealous environmentalism ... Bourgon paints both sides in sympathetic hues, and she takes a largely neutral stance on who’s right and who’s wrong in the cat-and-mouse game she details. She sees — and does her best to convey — the poachers and their pursuers in an evenhanded manner ... The problem is that the stakes are far from even. On the one hand, unemployed loggers and others who are suffering economically because of stringent enforcement of conservation laws are facing poverty. On the other hand, the damage that poachers are inflicting on forests appears to be, in the grand scheme of things, modest.
Evan Hughes
PositiveThe New York Time Book Review... fast-paced and maddening ... what’s most surprising and powerful about The Hard Sell is not one company’s criminality — we’ve grown inured to corporations behaving badly — as much as how institutionalized these practices were across the modern drug industry ... My one big complaint about The Hard Sell is that it’s unclear how much damage Subsys did in the context of the broader opioid epidemic. Hughes includes tales of people overdosing and becoming addicted, of lives and families shattered, but I was left unsure whether prescription drugs like Subsys were a root cause of the fentanyl crisis, a contributing factor or a meaningless blip ... At times I wondered if the answer might be the latter and if Hughes was dodging an inconvenient fact so as not to deflate an otherwise compelling story. If so, he needn’t have worried. Even if Insys turns out to be a footnote in the opioid epidemic, there is value in exposing the world to the scummy underbelly of a powerful industry — especially one that has become the sudden object of so much public gratitude.
Julie K. Brown
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe story of how Brown produced this exposé is at times gripping ... At its best, Perversion of Justice courses with Brown’s adrenaline. Brown deftly reconstructs the scenes involving Epstein’s victims and allows these young women—some seemingly made stronger by their ordeals, others still quaking from the terrors they endured—to speak at length and in searing, at times graphic, detail ... The women’s haunting voices echo off the page; their narratives are devastating ... Elsewhere, however, Brown falters. She weaves her personal stories into the narration of her Epstein reporting, and the crisscrossing timelines sometimes get tangled into confusing knots. She swerves between disarming candor and eyeroll-inducing cliché ... Brown awkwardly airs grievances with her editor and other Herald colleagues ...The effect is jarring, like watching someone bad-mouth a person who is standing right behind her. Readers hoping for answers to the many questions that continue to swirl around Epstein will be disappointed ... We are often left instead with insinuations. Brown litters her prose with passive verbs and carefully placed adverbs that give her room to imply cause and effect without proving it. This is the type of writing that I doubt would have survived The Herald’s editing and vetting processes ... I found myself wondering what other incorrect assumptions Brown made and that I had glided past, oblivious. None of this detracts from the magnitude of Brown’s original accomplishment.
Brian Stelter
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis is the value of Hoax, the new book by the CNN journalist Brian Stelter. It provides a thorough and damning exploration of the incestuous relationship between Trump and his favorite channel — and of Fox’s democracy-decaying role as a White House propaganda organ masquerading as conservative journalism ... is not likely to change many readers’ minds is already conventional wisdom. (Also, let’s be honest, not many Fox fans are likely to read this book.) Even so, Stelter’s cataloging of the power and toxicity of Fox is an important addition to the growing library of books documenting this strange period in American history ... Stelter is at his best when he is explaining the underlying forces that led Fox to embrace propaganda ... Stelter is far from an impartial observer. He is the host of a CNN show about the media, and his regular criticisms of Fox have made him a popular punching bag for Hannity and others ... Early on in Hoax, Stelter acknowledges that he is \'shocked and angry\' by what is going on at Fox, and his emotions sometimes seem to get the better of him. He resorts to name-calling and spreads gratuitous gossip about Fox personalities, at one point quoting an unnamed source’s assertion that a female anchor \'knew how to use sex to get ahead.\' Coming from a victim of Fox’s smears, it feels a little retributive ... Stelter also glosses over the fact that CNN is guilty of its own, Fox-lite version of partisan pandering ... My biggest disappointment with Hoax is that Stelter doesn’t unpack the greatest mystery of Fox’s success: Why is the channel’s unbridled demagogy so enticing? Do viewers realize they’re getting played? Do they care? ... I would be curious to hear from and better understand those viewers. There is no sign that Stelter spoke to any. Readers are left to look down on Fox’s millions of loyalists as gullible members of an extremist cult. It is just the sort of easy-to-digest but unnuanced conclusion that would play well on cable news.
Ben Mezrich
MixedThe New York Times...it’s hard to muster much pity for two privileged young men ... Mezrich treats the brothers’ Bitcoin binge as something profound, as if they are the visionaries who created the cryptocurrency rather than the rich gamblers who wagered on it ... Mezrich is a talented storyteller, and portions of Bitcoin Billionaires offer memorable glimpses inside the messy world of a start-up currency ... Mezrich’s tale is hampered by his reliance on the Winklevoss brothers as his main sources ... the narrative is polluted by clichés ... there is Mezrich’s jarring disclosure at the outset that some details and settings described in the book are \'imagined.\' It is hard to overcome the impression that large swaths of the book fall into that fictional zone.
