PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe voice of her essays seems to speak from a podium or pulpit. The difference between her fiction and nonfiction is akin to the one between practice and theory, or between a swim in a mountain lake and a lecture, delivered with unexpected brio and occasional thunder, on the properties of water ... At a time when academia can resemble an archipelago, the disciplines more specialized than finch beaks in the Galápagos, Robinson’s audaciously heterodox thinking can exhilarate ... Nevertheless, Robinson is at her best when drawing upon her own reservoirs of learning in theology, history and literature to fill in the omissions of others. When she aims polemically at certain of the sciences, or at modern and postmodern thought, her narratives create their own black holes ... 'This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history,' Robinson writes here — to which I can imagine what my grandmother might say, were she alive and seated in the lecture hall. The same thing I would say, though I left the church long ago: Amen.
Annie Dillard
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn what feels like a valedictory collection, Dillard has selected, rearranged and in some cases retitled and revised 22 of the best essays she’s written over the last 40 years, curating what amounts to a retrospective exhibit of her own career ... The Abundance is crepuscular. Darkness keeps falling across the page. Readers seeking pretty glimpses of heaven on earth will find little comfort here. Humor, yes. And a fair portion of the beautiful and the sublime. A great deal of the sublime. But little comfort.
