RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe Bookseller of Florence brings us back to a world \'haunted by the thought of all the ancient knowledge lost to the world\' and those who strove to recover and share as much of it as possible, shaping the modern world in the process. Mr. King is the writer of several acclaimed books of historical nonfiction, including Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. His latest work is a marvel of storytelling and a master class in the history of the book, explaining sometimes arcane bookmaking processes in clear and coherent language while lending an easy touch to otherwise confounding historical turmoil. The Bookseller of Florence is a dazzling, instructive and highly entertaining book, worthy of the great bookseller it celebrates.
Richard Ovenden
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... eminently readable ... Despite its title, Burning the Books is concerned as much with the building and maintaining of libraries as with their annihilation. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with libraries and what Mr. Ovenden outlines as their role in \'the support of democracy, the rule of law and open society.\' He takes care to emphasize the remarkable resiliency with which libraries can be revived after their looting and destruction in times of war or revolution, often with added safeguards and renewed sense of purpose.
Kathy Peiss
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... presents a fascinating, and until now little-known, story. Writing in an engaging style, Ms. Peiss synthesizes an array of historical details, intriguing personalities and byzantine bureaucratic divisions into a coherent narrative. She explains how heroic librarians not only aided the war effort—delivering intelligence about fascist technology, propaganda and infrastructure—but also altered the practice of librarianship, ushering in an era of mass foreign acquisitions and widespread microfilm use, as well as giving urgent focus to the rapid extraction of vital information rather than the simple storage of data. The history of librarianship isn’t as quiet as some of us might believe.
Kathleen Jamie
PositiveThe Washington PostThroughout it all, the reader encounters passages of breathtaking beauty ... though Jamie always finds herself relentlessly tugged away from primordial beauty toward anxieties of the modern world and a looming sense of catastrophe, the immediacy of her surroundings giving way to a geologic sense of time.
Seidel Frederick
MixedThe Contemporary Poetry ReviewIn Seidel’s poetry, privilege and wealth do not effectively insulate the speaker from third-world genocide, terrorism, and starvation; quite the opposite—those horrors are amplified ... On the positive side of the ledger, he takes risks utterly unthinkable, even as merely mutinous provocation, in an academic workshop. The effect is gratifying but somehow out of proportion ... At other times, he suffers clear defeats, and his internal rhymes begin to sound clotted and finally cloying.
Edward Wilson-Lee
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...superb ... Mr. Wilson-Lee’s smartly written book takes in almost the whole of the Renaissance ... Mr. Wilson-Lee reminds us that a library is not merely an accumulation of books but the enlightened and often maddeningly complex systems that make the knowledge they preserve useful. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books affords an intriguing glimpse into the Renaissance mind and its rage for order, as well as a beguiling preview of the modern library and, very possibly, what lies beyond.
Daniel Kalder
RaveThe Washington PostIn all, this is a mesmerizing study of books by despots great and small, from the familiar to the largely unknown ... Kalder’s survey of the bizarre library of dictator literature might easily leave a reader shaken, even dejected. The badness of these books, and their effects, is almost impossible to fathom ... Luckily, Kalder maintains a skeptical sense of humor throughout.
