PositiveThe Observer (UK)[A] rich, counterintuitive history ... One occasionally wishes that Hoyer broadened her vision from East Germany to the eastern bloc as a whole. A comparative viewpoint might have made clearer the peculiarity of East Germany’s achievement and its tragedy.
Tom McCarthy
MixedThe MillionsThe plot is sketchy by design, since its purpose is to serve as a vehicle for the novel’s driving obsessions with crypts, codes, and transmission. The whole book is crisscrossed with wires ... C’s intellectual preoccupations can be fascinating, but they don’t always sit well together. The links it draws between radio, codes, and secrets suggest a new theory of literary modernism, calling to mind a literature that is party autonomic and partly scavenged, carried along subterranean avenues and fugitive broadcasts ... For all his research, McCarthy writes as if the past century simply hadn’t happened, dropping the scandalous tropes of ninety years ago directly into his prim blocks of Neo-Victorian prose where they can no longer offend or surprise ... At its best, C feels like the continuation of an ongoing conversation with the literary past, in which the murmur of the previous fin-de-siècle comes through like static on the radio. But too often, McCarthy gets bogged down in the paradoxes of writing a historicist avant-garde novel ... C is at once an ingenious commentary on the work of his masters and a grim attempt to turn their innovations into a comfortably reproducible genre.
Kapka Kassabova
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksBorders frighten; frontiers entice. Despite its title, Kapka Kassabova’s marvelous new travelogue is a book about both ... As good as Kassabova is at telling the hard stories of migrants, refugees, and escapees, she is even better when she lets herself linger in a place and absorb its rhythms and idiosyncrasies. Fortunately for us, she does this a lot, and the result is that Border is a pure delight ... Border is that rarest of things: a travel book with a conscience that is also a compendium of wonders. It as thoughtful as Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as open to the world as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, as beautiful in its architecture as Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia ... In Border, Kassabova herself has achieved something akin to the revelation sought by these forgotten monks and fire-walkers: she has let her ego take a backseat to her senses, if not quite dissolve entirely. Her book is the product of a roving eye and an acute ear. It is a masterpiece of what I would call slow geography.
Brian Merchant
RaveThe GuardianLike the best historians, Merchant, an American journalist and editor of Vice Media’s technology blog, Motherboard, unpacks the history of the iPhone in a way that makes it seem both inevitable in its outline and surprising in its details ... Some of the best sections in The One Device involve Merchant going out to recover some of these forgotten pioneers ... In sections scattered throughout the book, Merchant tries to wrestle with the moral price of a single iPhone...What should we do with this information? The very complexity of a device such as the iPhone makes it difficult to conduct the sort of moral calculus which can be applied to simpler commodities such as diamonds or gold. A wide-ranging history like Merchant’s is the start of an answer.
