PanThe Guardian (UK)Dull, insight-free ... There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the \'his eyes lit up\' school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter ... To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life ... We know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.
James Poniewozik
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf TV execs were asked to classify James Poniewozik’s illuminating new book...they might use the term \'dramedy.\' Poniewozik is a funny, acerbic and observant writer ... But Poniewozik, the chief television critic of this newspaper, uses his ample comedic gifts in the service of describing a slow-boil tragedy. If humor is the rocket of his ICBM, the last three years of our lives are the destructive payload ... Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Audience of One is that it makes Trump’s presidency seem almost inevitable. Of course he won ... Audience of One is worth the price of admission just for its brilliant dissection of the 1980 film comedy Caddyshack, which I had mostly remembered for Bill Murray’s battle with some species of marmot. In Poniewozik’s take the movie is a prophecy of our current nightmare ... Poniewozik never underestimates Trump’s malicious genius (as so many of us have) ... ...Poniewozik offers few solutions for the problems that plague the mass media realm...He is less a neurosurgeon (though I suspect he would not confuse a Middle Eastern fundamentalist movement with baba ghanouj) than a general practitioner with his stethoscope tight on our country’s wheezing chest.
David Grossman
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance ... This is material Grossman has explored previously; indeed, some of it mirrors his own biography. But never has he presented it in one sustained performative howl, combining the comic dexterity of a Louis C.K. with a Portnoyish level of detail ... Its technical proficiency is astounding. At 194 pages, there is nothing extraneous, not one comma, not one word, not one drop of a comic’s sweat ... Grossman has taken it to a new level. He has left a trail of blood and sweat on the page that only a true master — a Lenny Bruce, a Franz Kafka — could dream of replicating.
