PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe sprawling story of Blay-Miezah’s outsize life and wayward career is told with mordant aplomb by first-time British-Ghanaian author Yepoka Yeebo ... While Anansi’s Gold reflects a daunting amount of research, it reads like a picaresque novel ... While Ms. Yeebo’s narrative is compelling, some of her postcolonial analysis is debatable.
Jeffrey Frank
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThere is much that is persuasive in Mr. Frank’s account, and much that is provocative and debatable. Many of Truman’s flaws are shared, to one degree or another, by all political figures, and Truman’s prejudices were of course very much of his time ... With a new kind of Cold War heating up and the foibles of our chief executives an ever more intense matter of scrutiny and concern, Mr. Frank’s book is timely in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he started it. While some of his opinions and interpretations—particularly about containment and the Korean War—are unlikely to persuade everyone, his revisionist take on Truman is rigorously researched, thought-provoking and, not least, a pleasure to read.
Ronald Brownstein
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Brownstein makes all this cultural history memorable by telling much of his story through profiles of figures like Jack Nicholson, Norman Lear, George Lucas, Ms. Ronstadt and Mr. Browne, and the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey ... With a book so rich in detail, it may be ungrateful to point out what isn’t there. Mr. Brownstein overlooks musicians like Harry Nilsson, Lori Lieberman and Patti Dahlstrom. There was also a lively comedy scene that was jump-started in 1972 when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank and Mitzi Shore opened the Comedy Store, where a new brand of humor developed, more freewheeling and less neurotic than its East Coast counterpart.
Lawrence Roberts
RaveThe Wall Street JournalRoberts tells the story superbly from start to finish ... With a talent for research and an eye for colorful detail, Mr. Roberts presents a lot of new and overlooked material ... Mr. Roberts’s default mode is to accept the notion that the protesters, with some exceptions, were essentially decent and right, while the administration was instinctively and invariably repressive and wrong. Because he sees the story—as he put it in a pre-publication interview—in terms of \'a government gone rogue [confronting] masses of citizens demanding change,\' he never presents Nixon’s rationale for believing it was his constitutional duty to resist mob rule and keep the government open ... As a result of the Tribe’s failure to shut Washington down, Mayday has been paid less attention than other protests of the period, and its significance overlooked. Mr. Roberts’s first-rate book redresses that imbalance.
