RaveThe Boston GlobeBecause Baron had published no previous books and hardly any articles, I had no idea of what kind of writer he would be. Editing and writing are related but separate skills, like directing and acting. Baron turns out to be good at both ... Offers something scarcer and far more interesting than most arguments over theory, which is a vivid and detailed chronology of how his part of the press actually did its job ... The barbed portraits along the way keep the book lively. I’ll leave them for readers to discover, and I’m sure some of those criticized will respond ... As the book ends, Joe Biden is being sworn in as president, and Marty Baron steps aside as an editor, presumably to his next role as a writer. This book is an excellent start.
John Lancaster
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewAmong the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful The Great Air Race is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry, a century ago ... My favorite book about Antarctic exploration is The Worst Journey in the World, by the British writer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a survivor of a doomed expedition in 1910. The Great Air Race has the same horrific but heroic fascination. Page by page you think, What else can go wrong? Page by page, you want to learn more ... This is Lancaster’s first book. But he deftly pulls off some tricks that are harder than they seem. He embeds social, economic and political history as he writes...A history of industrial policy is painlessly woven into the narrative ... I have read a lot about aviation and the aircraft industry over the years, but almost everything in this tale was new to me. You might take it on your next airline flight, pause to look out the window and spare a thought for those who helped make it all possible.
Phil Klay
RaveNew York Times Book ReviewThe rule of most writing — the shorter, the better — appears not to apply to Klay’s nonfiction. The half-dozen longest, meatiest and most probing essays and articles presented here share the lasting power of Klay’s acclaimed fiction. They were published separately, in different places over a decade-plus span. But read together they amount to an interwoven, evolving and revealing examination of Klay’s central topic: What it means for a country always at war, that so few of its people do the fighting ... The best of these essays combine reporting, with Klay’s observations from his own military service, with historical evidence and spiritual reflections ... It is engrossing and important, and I hope readers will start with the longest parts first.
Alex Von Tunzelmann
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis book starts well and ends well, with bumpy patches in between ... many of these stories are fascinating ... An unnerving aspect of these stories, for me, is that the ones I liked best concerned people and places I knew least about...Conversely, the closer von Tunzelmann comes to familiar or contested ground, the more I noticed oversimplification and glibness ... A deeper, recurring issue is her treatment of the long history of race relations in the United States. It’s a main theme of her book, and not one on which she displays great nuance ... When it comes to thorny issues, a sentence that can seem simplistic to the eye can be appropriately suggestive through the ear ... If a book’s purpose is to tell you stories and leave you with an idea, this idea of better styles of commemoration will stay with me.
Cade Metz
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... part of a rapidly growing literature attempting to make sense of the A.I. hurricane we are living through. These are very different kinds of books — Cade Metz’s is mainly reportorial, about how we got here ... about the people who have built the A.I. world — scientists, engineers, linguists, gamers — more than about the technology itself, or its good and bad effects. The fundamental technical debates and discoveries on which A.I. is based are a background to the individual profiles and corporate-drama scenes Metz presents.
Manuel Pastor
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"In his book, which is concise, clear and convincing, he contends that the redemptive arc of modern California’s history offers both cautionary and constructive guidance on a vision for the country as a whole ... Pastor is an academic sociologist, and this part of his book is written more in sociologese than the rest, including its extensive discussion of \'intersectionality,\' the overlapping effects of barriers of race, gender, class and other inequalities. But it ends with a list of practical lessons that can be drawn from California’s recent history to the national politics of coming years.\
Mark Thompson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewI don’t think this book will change the continuing debates about 'bias' and 'objectivity,' the separation of the public into distinct fact universes, the disappearing boundary between entertainment and civic life, the imperiled concept of 'truth' or the other important topics it addresses. But it offers many instructive allusions, useful judgments and important refinements on these themes — and provides reassurance by its mere existence that someone in the author’s position is grappling so earnestly with such questions.
