MixedThe Guardian (UK)Jennifer Otter Bickerdike digs deep into the life of one of the strangest and most unlikely singer-songwriters of our time ... Bickerdike’s is a gossipy but informative biography ... The biography is poorly written, with a surfeit of ill-chosen words ... You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone nevertheless grimly absorbs from start to finish.
Thomas Piketty, Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer
RaveAsymptoteAt his best, Piketty draws the potential dry discussion of economic systems into the complex interplay of human systems of politics, ideology, and history, and into the manifold ways these systems have taken shape throughout time and place. Perhaps most invigorating of all is the degree of faith Piketty places in human imagination and the ability to right wrongs and make active decisions to shape our collective future ... Capital and Ideology grapples with these unwieldy questions as well as any one book can, leaving us a timely and potent passageway into some of the most pressing issues of our globalized age. While crisis exposes the fault lines of societies more starkly, perhaps it can also provide a new opportunity to draw plans and take an honest look at forging a new path.
David Grann
RaveThe Financial Times""Grann tells the story of the Osage investigation with a Dashiell Hammett-like gift for suspense (appropriate, perhaps, since Hammett was himself briefly a Pinkerton op). Grimly entertaining, Killers of the Flower Moon is a marvel of detective-like research and narrative verve. Not surprisingly, it too is poised to become a Hollywood film.""
Peter Ackroyd
PositiveThe Financial TimesFor all its insight, Peter Ackroyd’s biography is a deft synthesis of numerous other studies of 'Alfred the Great'; it is well written, however, and unusually well attuned to the religious element.
Andrew Solomon
PositiveThe Financial TimesThe pieces, covering 25 years, are brilliant if occasionally overwrought. For all Solomon’s stylistic verve (camels howl at night 'like the spirits of purgatory crying out'), he displays a weakness for hyperbole and pseudo-aphorism ... Solomon is admirably quick to empathise with the downtrodden and marginalised ... In the best of the 28 collected pieces, though, Solomon is acutely aware of his status as a privileged, self-involved and confessedly 'Anglophile' white male ... [a] fascinating if occasionally irksome collection.
Frank Trentmann
PositiveThe GuardianThough fraught with inelegant-sounding sentences, Trentmann’s history of five centuries of material culture is impressive in its breadth and scholarship. Anyone with compulsive buying disorder should buy a copy, or two, or three. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
Ian Buruma
RaveThe GuardianThe book, an affecting portrait told through the grandparents’ many letters, turns a historian’s eye on wartime antisemitism and its consequences ... From his grandparents’ jigsaw-puzzle past, Buruma has assembled a fascinating chronicle of love, assimilation and immigration in modern Britain.
