MixedThe Washington Independent Review of BooksThe first and best half of How Time Flies focuses on human society’s collective relationship to time. Maybe the most revelatory sequence is Burdick’s description of the massive network of atomic clocks that now maintain humanity’s baseline time — Coordinated Universal Time ... The book really does begin to drag, though, when Burdick turns from exploring time as a biological or social phenomena to focusing on the intersection of time and subjective consciousness ... Burdick recounts an entire laundry list of lab experiments like this, and the theoretical squabbling over how to understand them. The ultimate takeaway is worthwhile...But Burdick puts an awful lot of obscuring detail between readers and [the] big picture ... Burdick mostly leaves us gawping in wonder at a mystery that only seems to get deeper the more we poke and prod it. But that’s a strength in the book, not a flaw.
Paul La Farge
RaveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksPaul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a book about the terror of fiction ... But La Farge also ruefully interrogates the dangers of that fun, and the book’s winding layers of story-upon-story eventually locate, within the fabulist’s trade itself, a novel twist on uncanny horror ... It is roughly a detective novel, and happily free of any version of Lovecraft’s own iconic creations. This separates it from a rather pathetic subgenre of work that waves a lot of tentacles around and calls it 'homage,' but La Farge does do some slightly more high-minded fan service ...the core achievement is darkly sublime, a translation of the cosmic insanity of Lovecraft’s work back into the human realm ...clearly aware that by blurring the lines of Lovecraft’s sexuality and personality, he is treating a real man’s legacy as an instrument ...The Night Ocean’s final message, at least in part, may be more nihilistic than anything Lovecraft ever penned.
Ian Bogost
PanThe Washington Independent Review of Books...there is something deeply dangerous about this aspect of Bogost’s argument. Because, while a temporary magic circle may enrich our experience of going to Wal-Mart or traversing the mall, those aren’t just transitory experiences — they’re manifestations of entire systems. And Bogost’s call to take joy in those systems often seems like a call to simply accept our entrapment in them ... Bogost is essentially arguing that our problem is not the world as it exists, but our perception of it, that the mundane horrors of our time could be turned into joys if we simply appreciated them more deeply.
Tom Wolfe
PanThe Washington Independent Review of Books...while the book does champion a profoundly important revision to our understanding of human development, it won’t offer you a particularly comprehensive or insightful take on that new paradigm. Instead, Tom Wolfe gives us something very Tom Wolfe-ian: a gossipy personal history of the figures and battles behind the ideas. Which would be fine, despite the misdirection, if there weren’t other substantial problems with The Kingdom of Speech. The biggest one is that Wolfe (now well into his 80s) is here practicing New Journalism from an armchair ... an important message delivered in a deeply flawed vessel.
