PositiveShepherd ExpressFatalism and dread, mollified by irony, stretch across these stories like a scrim of smoke from distant wildfires ... The American author writes in sparse, thoughtful sentences constructed from the narrators’ physical and emotional surroundings ... Originally published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, the stories collected in American Estrangement are told with a subtle sense of anticipation from lives suspended between hope and resignation.
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
PositiveShepherd Express... a beautifully written travelogue of places where people had been quarantined in earlier times, as well as a meditation on the ways and means, the rights and wrongs, of isolating people to prevent the spread of deadly contagions ... Until Proven Safe is most interesting for its history, recalling the forgotten connection between passports and public health and the steps taken by NASA to prevent lunar microbes (if they exist) to return home with the Apollo astronauts.
Sheila Weller
PositiveThe Milwaukee Shepherd ExpressSheila Weller eagerly recounts that life cut short in her biography, Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge ... An enjoyable quick read, A Life on the Edge is respectfully dishy, supportive and frank, a thoughtful fan’s book.
Joyce Carol Oates
PositiveShepherd ExpressOates is especially effective in picturing the internal life, the self-perceptions of Violet Rue, as memories and fears from the past crisscross her uncertain path into the future. The prose never bogs down and as the story pushes forward, the reader is eager to be pulled along. My Life as a Rat is keenly aware of the feelings of its female characters and the dangerous ways of men ... My Life as a Rat includes many meaningful sideways glances at other issues ... Oates correctly records the currents of class resentment and racial backlash that run like live wires under American society.
Janet Malcolm
RaveShepherd ExpressJanet Malcolm’s subtle snark is more like the swipe of a cat’s claws than the barking dogs of contemporary media. Her essay collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, has no unifying theme beyond her unassuming-yet-willing-to-draw-blood sensibility ... Reading Malcolm is a pleasure for the quiet force of her intelligence.
James Campion
RaveThe Shepherd Express\"Campion is a Warren Zevon fan with a literary-musical-analytical mind and his perspective on the man behind \'Lawyers, Guns and Money\' is informed and persuasive ... Accidentally Like a Martyr is one of the best recent rock biographies for its profound insights.\
Krista Tippett
PositiveThe Milwaukee Shepard ExpressWith Becoming Wise, Tippett gives herself an opportunity to speak her mind—and does so with a soft-spoken breadth of understanding in keeping with the tone of her program. As the title suggests, Becoming Wise is a thoughtful examination of what it means to be fully human and aware, open eyed in the face of 'the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life.'
Timothy Egan
PositiveShepherd ExpressA Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Egan tells the story beautifully. The Immortal Irishman is polemical and hagiographic, but its arguments and the lavish praise heaped on its subject are grounded in solid research.
Ed Sanders
PanThe Milwaukee Shepard Express[Tate] was on the brink of becoming known in her chosen field but will forever be known instead for her death, not her life. Sanders’ biography endeavors to change that, but as the author more or less admits, his hill is a steep one to climb. Tate kept no diaries and wrote few letters. At one point, Sanders resorts to using a recent posting on the Tate family website by one of Sharon’s long ago friends to fill a gap in the timeline. Repeatedly, when interviewing people who knew the starlet, he is confronted by the realization that those people can’t remember.
