RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThis juicy, jaunty book is about Broadway in the 1990s, a period of great change that paved the way for the industry’s recent artistic and financial prosperity. Singular Sensation offers less an explanation of present-day abundance, however, than a reminder of all that has been lost ... This is just the kind of stuff Riedel was born to write about. No one gets a quote like him, or an anecdote that speaks to the alternately vicious and thrilling nature of Broadway. Even when the provenance or accuracy of an observation is hazy, you’re still happy to see it included ... If Singular Sensation has a flaw, it is its reluctance to engage with these ideas; you long to see Riedel weigh the pros and cons of Broadway’s increasingly commercial culture ... Then again, that’s not Riedel’s beat. You read him for the broadsheet prose, for the swashbuckling verdicts, for the searing quotes ... To put it more simply: the book made me feel better.
Casey McQuiston
MixedLos Angeles Review of Books\"... a kind of queer bodice-ripper for the Trump era, a novel whose political fantasies feature as prominently as its romantic escapades ... In situating Alex and Henry’s coming-out on a global stage, McQuiston has performed a cunning bit of literary activism. The political trappings of the story both heighten and deflate the stakes of being gay or bisexual ... According to her vision, coming out is hard, but it’s also kind of a blast—just one dramatic escapade in a book full of them. Not that a casual reader would get any of this from the novel; Red, White & Royal Blue has no ambition to be a work of serious fiction. The writing, though mostly unobtrusive, can be blunt and overly emphatic ...
And although the sex is fun, it also falls into cliché ... Indeed, part of the book’s pleasure is in its unabashed willingness to be conventional—all while taking the decidedly unconventional tack of casting two men as the central romantic leads ... It welcomes queer people into the charming clichés of romantic comedy.\
David Wallace-Wells
RaveThe RumpusForget uplift: Wallace-Wells offered no can-do optimism, no hopeful urges to stop using plastic straws. His was instead a relentlessly grim portrait of where we are today, and where, barring mass mobilization, we’re headed ... Every page presents a horror show of facts and figures ... While some climate journalists tend couch gloomy statistics within the softening context of narrative—poor fishermen! sad polar bears!—Wallace-Wells gives us the goods, neat. The resulting book is refreshingly clear-eyed: Wallace-Wells respects his readers enough not to scrub his message of its bleakness, and lets the facts speak for themselves. (His claims are backed up in a voluminous and surprisingly engaging notes section.) At times the prose collapses under its own weight, but mostly the sentences gust and howl, holding the reader with the hurricane-like force of their terrifying beauty ... Wallace-Wells is a true rhetorician, and in climate change he has found a subject well suited to the incantatory power of his voice.
Pete Buttigieg
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe book is clearly intended as a campaign document, and contains all the humanizing anecdotes and professional backstory typical of a political memoir. But Shortest Way Home is more than just a stump speech with a dust jacket. It’s a vivid and surprisingly lyrical portrait of a city and a man in transition — and an intellectual performance in which Buttigieg succeeds in making his play at the presidency seem entirely, thrillingly appropriate ... This is more that just campaign copy — it’s real writing ... Though [Buttigieg] admits to the political risk of coming out, he makes no corresponding personal analysis. Is Buttigieg torn up about being gay? How does he come into an awareness of his sexuality? How does he square his desires with the teachings of his Catholic high school? We never find out, and skip straight to the happy ending ... Buttigieg’s book is so much better than most political memoirs, and its quality sharpens the reader’s appetite for true confession, for true disclosure ... It’s therefore a disappointment to see Buttigieg go mum on this front when he’s otherwise so forthcoming, at least by the standards of presidential candidates.
Richard Powers
RaveThe RumpusPowers has here managed to turn the liabilities of climate change—its vastness, its resistance to decisive heroes and villains—into assets. We get not an isolated story, but a forest of them; not one or two main characters, but a whole thicket. This delirious sense of sprawl serves both as a formal mimicry of climate changes—everything implicates everything—while also allowing Powers to address global warming from a thrilling variety of perspectives. By following wildly different people on their various storylines, we get a vivid sketch of how climate touches every inch of the Earth ... The book even has a sense of humor about its capaciousness, its Whitmanian appetite for more, more, more ... so much of the book is fantastic precisely because of its hugeness, its gleeful spilling-over ... The Overstory displays a kind of faith—a faith that global warming will force humans to change into other things, not because we want to, not because it is the right thing to do, but because we will have no other choice.
