MixedWashington Independent Review of BooksFriedman is an engaging narrator, but his book may try the patience of many readers. His weaving together of so many strands of human history is a remarkable achievement, but his non-linear and frequently repetitive prose make for an overly long book. Most crucially, the argument he is trying to make is often obscured by the plethora of detail. A little streamlining might, in fact, have left room for a sorely needed last chapter: how a global pandemic has shone a merciless light on the economic precarity of our society and discredited the policies long supported by religious and economic conservatives.
Laila Lalami
PanThe Washington Independent Review of BooksOn the surface, its timing could not be better ... Timeliness is a double-edged sword, however. If an author is writing about a topic that is in the very air we breathe these days, it is imperative to say something that others do not. Lalami misses the mark in spite of her unique experiences as a Muslim from Morocco who became a U.S. citizen 20 years ago. At issue is a book so profoundly disorganized that it raises anew the question of what precisely editors do these days ... Lalami is no neophyte author: She is an award-winning novelist, as well as a creative writing professor at the University of California Riverside. But her debut attempt at a nonfiction book seems to have gotten away from her ... The book defies description, and not in a good way. Is it a memoir? Sort of, but Lalami constantly veers away from the story of her own life and only returns to it intermittently. A book of essays? A note at the end mentions that sections were originally published in various magazines, but one topic bleeds into another with no rhyme or reason. It is not uncommon for authors to weave seemingly disparate subjects into a coherent whole, but that does not happen here ... Scholarship is sparse, with \'sourcing\' that is anything but — endnotes mostly expand on points made in the main text, or refer to newspaper articles or the author’s previous work — and the book is heavily reliant on anecdotes and the author’s \'feelings\' to make unsupported assertions ... The most perplexing aspect of Lalami’s book is her seeming lack of awareness of the here and now. The reader will look in vain for, say, a reference to Black Lives Matter. Instead, Lalami rehashes a number of incidents that are very old news to any reader who is even marginally well-informed ... In the end, Lalami’s book is a lost opportunity. Its one truly revelatory part — a history of Muslims in America, buried within Lalami’s grab-bag of other topics — could have served as a backdrop to her own story and made for a compelling and unique read. Instead, the author has chosen to lecture us on much that we already know while overlooking the many ways history has moved on, seemingly without her awareness.
David A. Kaplan
PanWashington Independent Review of Books\"Kaplan, unfortunately, takes many pages to get to his main point, because his stellar credentials... are something of a dual-edged sword. He just knows so much about the court, and he is eager to impart every bit of information to us ... The actual first part of the book, \'Characters,\' is exasperatingly padded and should have been trimmed down to the details ... Instead, Kaplan crams in such gratuitous trivia as the bobbleheads on Chief Justice John Roberts’ desk and Elena Kagan’s moniker, \'the Fro Yo Justice\' (a story that is not even funny) ... the reader can feel that a far more apt title of this book would be Supreme Court Confidential ... The reader who sticks with Kaplan to (almost) the end, however, is rewarded with the finest chapter in the book ... From here, however, it’s mostly downhill.\
Joshua Zeitz
PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksLess examined, and the central theme of Zeitz’s book, is that not even the larger-than-life Johnson could go it alone; his success resulted from his assembly of one of the greatest White House staffs of all time ... Zeitz’s book also draws pointed lessons that any administration would be wise to heed ... Finally, there is the tacit lesson that some of the most profound societal changes for the good are more likely to occur during periods of government activism than periods of government rollbacks. We are currently experiencing the latter, and it is to be hoped that Zeitz’s book can play a small role in pushing the pendulum back in the direction of the former.
