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Recent Reviews
Adam Gopnik
Positive The New York Times Book Review Witty, humane, learned, A Thousand Small Sanities is a book that some of its author’s many fans may be tempted to read too fast ... He wants to assimilate and domesticate the illiberal left, to the maximum extent he can. But diverted by the book’s charm and erudition, readers may overlook its more challenging purposes ... what commands Gopnik’s attention is a challenge to his convictions more formidable and more intimate: the resurgence of the illiberal left from the post-Communist wreckage ... A Thousand Small Sanities is a product of the period that some wit has dubbed \'the Great Awokening\' ... To a great extent, he is almost as uncomfortable with these dead white giants as any intersectional critic ... Gopnik is alive to the intellectual deficiencies of wokeness.
Amy Chua
Mixed The New York Times Book Review In the end, Chua falls back on the very attitude to which she turned her sharply skeptical gaze at the beginning of the book: the conviction that the United States was, is and will remain an exceptional nation, different from all the others. In her introduction, Chua remarked that the United States as a supertribal entity indifferent to ethnicity and culture became at best a partial reality only a generation ago. By book’s end, however, the battered ideal has been polished and refurbished ... A lot of the interest of Political Tribes comes from the strong sense it emanates of an author arguing with herself.
Kenneth Whyte
Rave The Atlantic Whyte summons us to see Hoover as a human personality, more than just a walking embodiment of Great Depression studies. Hoover’s personality was the product of origins and early career that Whyte attentively details ... Whatever else the Trump presidency is doing and has done, it has closed the book on that old 'new conservatism.' It’s early to perceive what will succeed it, but it won’t be that. And when the time for succession comes, Hoover’s old party could learn things from his impressive career of public service. Among the great services of Ken Whyte’s elegant, lively, and witty biography is its unceasing reminder of this other Hoover ... To understand Hoover’s life, career, and his legacy in full, this rich new biography will certainly prove indispensable.
Tina Brown
Positive The Atlantic Here not only is her voice and sensibility, but also her searching and candid self-assessment ... In all those years devoted to coaxing better work out of balky writers, one great writer was persistently sacrificed: Tina Brown herself. 'You can teach people structure,' Brown observes early in her diary-memoir, 'and how to write a lead. But you can’t teach them how to notice the right things.' Brown is a writer who notices and notices and notices ... Tina Brown’s story is that American classic: the striver arriving to make a mark in and upon New York.