PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHeartwarming ... There are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto \'life lessons\' in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.
Sylvia Brownrigg
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAn exuberant yarn ... Brownrigg is by background a novelist, and some way into the book, she veers from memoir into fiction. This is a risky move. But, while the fictionalization of her grandfather’s experience in 1930s Kenya feels a bit cursory and labored, Brownrigg’s childhood adventures at her dad’s ranch practically leap off the page ... What I love about this memoir is how ably it gets at something very complicated indeed: the way in which, over generations and in the face of good intentions, family bonds can loosen and die.
Barbra Streisand
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)\"Most celebrity memoirs rely on a certain amount of pre-existing goodwill to shunt readers through the more banal parts. With Streisand, this principle is stretched to such a degree that by the end of the book, one is left in a state of wonder – at the accomplishments of an American icon, yes, but also at the sheer volume of detail passed on. While visualising the star in her various guises, another image came to mind as I was reading: that of an editor in an office in midtown Manhattan, quietly burying her head in her hands. The extent to which you are able to find this endearing will probably come down to how endearing you find Streisand herself. Personally, I’m a fan. And for the first half of the book, the story races along with all the charm and energy of its protagonist ... It is only towards the end of the book that the emotional denouement arrives and, for all the absurdity of the wait, I would suggest it’s worth it. In the meantime, there is an awful lot of fun in these pages, particularly in the book’s opening half ... She hardly needs more praise at this point, but hear hear!\
Michael Lewis
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Fascinating ... I should say here that I love Michael Lewis. As with all of his writing – with the exception of a toe-curling profile he did of President Obama for Vanity Fair 11 years ago – Going Infinite is insanely readable and I devoured it, marvelling at Lewis’s ability to pace, structure and humanise a story about something as dense and unfriendly as crypto.
Anand Giridharadas
RaveThe Observer (UK)A thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already ... As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fan ... The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read ... Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions ... The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view ... The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages ... This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.
Patricia Highsmith, Ed. by Anna von Planta
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)\'I am becoming a little odd, personally,\' she wrote in 1954, a fact that grew more pronounced as the years went by. It’s a startling effect of reading the diaries that one begins to understand not only why this occurred, but the impact it had on Highsmith’s fiction ... a portrait of Highsmith from the jolly solipsism of her 20s in New York—when, to read her diaries, you’d have had no idea the second world war was ongoing—to her sombre 50s and 60s, when she became increasingly bitter about the world and her life. In between are years of turmoil and heartbreak consistent with a truism about diaries: that you never write down the happy stuff. And yet alongside Highsmith’s rage and despair there is a great deal of joy, courage and unvanquishable still‑in-the-game spirit ... One of the delights of the early diary entries is the unlikely spectacle of Highsmith as steward of a lot of glancing—Bridget Jones-type material ... By the early 1950s, Highsmith’s flippancy is starting to erode, as the permissiveness of the war years gives way to the more socially conservative America of the day.
Fiona Mozley
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf there is something slightly pious about this, it is still a neat way into a lot of idiocy and hypocrisy in modern life. There are some lovely observations ... Occasionally the snail’s pace grinds to a halt ... But the novel is so precise and granular in its evocation of London that it made me thoroughly homesick while reading it. And Mozley is very good on the degree to which circumstance shapes interior life.
Curtis Sittenfeld
RaveThe Observer (UK)...a wilder ride than [the] pitch might suggest. I kept losing track, as I read, of what kind of novel it was and of whether or not I approved. The first third, cleaving roughly to reality and Bill and Hillary’s early years at Yale Law School and in Arkansas, includes a lot of feverish, Black Lace-type sex scenes ... The second, a meditation on the experience of a single woman in politics, follows Hillary back home to Chicago after she walks out on Bill. Finally and most surprisingly, in the last third of the book, Rodham becomes a kind of revenge fantasy for women who sublimate their own ambitions for the sake of their husband’s careers, at which point I had to tip my hat to Sittenfeld. I went into the novel thinking the entire premise was crass and came out of it thoroughly entertained ... I don’t hate Hillary, but I have had enough of her, or so I thought. The first surprise of the novel is how gripping it is; the second is how worthy its protagonist is as a subject for fiction ... There is a shadow text behind Rodham, which is the charge sheet of slurs, many of them misogynist, that the real Hillary has put up with for her entire career and which the novel seeks to dismantle ... It’s an irony of the book that, while seeking to rescue Hillary from caricature, it ends up being a kind of love letter to a type: the American bluestocking and female intellectual, who is given none of the licence of her less talented male peers. At the end, which I won’t spoil, I actually said out loud: \'Oh, my God\' – and, to my amazement, found myself moved.
David Kushner
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book strains, at times, to extrapolate broader lessons from what happened. It needn’t; the study of a family in extremis is enough. 'I long for this kid, my Jon, part of me,' Kushner’s mother writes in her journal, six months after the murder. One of the questions raised by the author is, How does one survive the worst thing? The only answer is this: A mother writing to her son, years after his death, 'Do you still know that you are loved?'
