RaveThe New Yorker... the product of rigorous writerly attention ... If Know My Name had been shaped in these slicker forms—a corrective, a tell-all—readers sympathetic to Miller would have readily received her rage, whatever her tone. But Miller situates victimhood as a conduit to expertise, and trauma as a mode of human insight ... Miller is a gifted storyteller who establishes her authority by stacking details, setting scenes ... she observes her own ordeal by adopting the stance of a reporter, a media critic, and an activism-minded theorist. She is heartbreakingly resourceful, marshalling her subjectivity as evidence of a system set up to protect the potential of a boy like Turner ... contains a forceful critique of the complicity of liberal institutions like Stanford, which seem more afraid of upsetting sensibilities than they are concerned with doing right by survivors like Miller ... Miller’s writing début may have been precipitated by her assault, but the final work devitalizes its horrific beginnings. No narrative is as persuasive as Miller’s. There is no more self-effacing sobriety, no more conclusions plastering confusion and fury. Know her name, know her voice.
Michelle Obama
MixedThe New Yorker\"[Becoming] is really two books in one, the first half detail-oriented and warm, the second starched and broad-brushed ... But [Obama\'s] candor dissipates once we get past the reeling first year in the White House, where she knew that her \'grace would have to be earned.\' The summary of Obama’s White House initiatives relies on promotional language and well-worn anecdotes, and the book’s final pages are just a shade away from an overt advertisement for the Obama Foundation. The memoir’s \'bombshell\' revelations, which the media has projected as revelations of the female condition writ large—a discussion of Obama’s use of fertility treatment to conceive her daughters, and of a period of her marriage in which \'frustrations began to rear up often and intensely\'—belie how much the rest of the text withholds.\
Omarosa Manigault Newman
PanThe New Yorker\"In short, you don’t really need to read Unhinged, which recalls Carrie Bradshaw bloviating at her desk at midnight. (\'I had to wonder, if Trump used the N-word so frequently during that season of the show, had he ever used it to refer to either Kwame or myself?\') Much of the book’s information is mundane, already reported on, or unsubstantiated. The arc turns on an inane semantic argument—that \'there is a difference between being a racist, racial, and someone who racializes\'—and the fact that, coincidentally, right around the time Omarosa had to find a new gig, she realized Trump was a racist ... she can’t seem to choose between dressing herself as a bushy-tailed mentee, whose abstracted loyalty precludes her from seeing the misogyny and racism of her \'mentor,\' or a savvy career woman, who was willing to play dirty to get ahead ... Opportunism has never morally burdened her, which makes her self-interest seem both egregious and banal. She has clung to her infamy, in part, by perverting the black worker’s experience of racism. She has always exploited the vantage of the pariah, but has more frequently tried to frame herself as a victim.\
Danzy Senna
PositiveThe New YorkerThrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity. Her characters, and the clannish worlds they are often trying to escape, teeter on the brink of ruin and absurdity. Senna’s latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable New People, makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia ... There were moments when, reading New People, I wondered if Senna had crafted Maria as a rebuttal to the lure of relatability in black art, which is itself a new form of sobriety. Just when we think we understand Maria—as a wayward, Brooklyn twenty-something in search of stability just like everyone else—she shocks us ... For Senna, identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.
Roxane Gay
MixedThe New YorkerSome of the liveliest prose in Hunger can be found in her previously published takedowns of the 'weight-loss industrial complex,' in which she points out the depraved strategies of The Biggest Loser and of life-style deputies like Oprah and Kirstie Alley ... Several times, Gay writes a version of “I’m a mess.” There is occasionally something proud, almost, in Gay’s lethargic prose, as if to focus on language would be beside the point. But there are a few moments when Gay gives us a glimpse of the deeper account that Hunger might have been—one in which she pursues, rather than merely dispatches with, the contradictions that have so painfully defined her life.
