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Recent Reviews
Jennet Conant
Rave The Washington Post Her courageous coverage in Korea is rendered in wonderful detail by Conant ... Though Conant’s prose is plain and straightforward, her subject is so full of life that it makes up for any lack of literary flourish. Her painstaking detail would not have been possible without a woman named Kathleen Kearney Keeshen, who spent 12 years in the ’70s and ’80s interviewing Higgins’s fellow reporters, military officials, husbands and lovers for her master’s and PhD theses. It’s fortunate that Keeshan — whom Conant thanks on both the dedication page and at length in the book’s acknowledgments — was not as competitive as Higgins. Because of Conant’s and Keeshan’s collaboration, Higgins’s life is now rendered in full, no longer lost to the march of male-dominated history.
Russell Shorto
Positive The New York Times Book Review In the end, this is not a mob story. It’s a story of family dynamics. Of love and loss and betrayal. Of Shorto’s hometown. Of his own relationship with his father and his father’s relationship with his father. In other words, it’s a family memoir. Whether Shorto likes it or not. His reluctance — perhaps a mere literary device — is a roadblock. But once Shorto’s on the highway, steering us along with his usual humor and eye for quirky detail, settling an hour from his hometown for easy access, we are with him. All the way, as Sinatra would say.
Matt Zoller Seitz
Positive The Washington Post Dense, all-encompassing ... Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, and Alan Sepinwall, chief TV critic for Rolling Stone — are the real deal. Their analysis of that opening-credits drive — which compares the ride to the evolution of immigrants in American society — is enough reason for any fan to buy this book ... The writers pick apart and analyze, in exhaustive and exhausting detail, each hilarious and disturbing episode of the seven seasons, making you want to go back and watch them all over again.
Idra Novey
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The novel’s political intrigue and corruption, and the sadness that accompanies the sense of helplessness in the face of a great evil, is prescient ... we feel the tired futility in [Novey\'s] bones—and ours ... There are beautifully bright details...that keep us hungry for more, turning the pages toward some sort of resolution. But the villain’s comeuppance seems like an afterthought rather than the cathartic moment it should be. And a last-minute attempt at an optimistic future seems tacked on as well ... Novey seems older, tired and slightly hopeless. But, then, aren’t we all?