MixedAir MailCuriously, Risen strains to absolve Robert Kennedy for his complicity, as his brother’s attorney general, in the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr ... Risen’s admiration for Church, whom he describes as an “American Cicero” and “a radical in senatorial clothing,” inclines him to triumphalism ... Risen also neglects to speculate as to what the object of his adulation would have to say about the way so many in the modern Democratic Party worship at the feet of the national-security state he devoted his career to reining in.
David French
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn his admirably measured book...French convincingly argues that polarization is putting America on a perilous path to disunion ... French understands better than most that coexistence with people of radically different backgrounds and beliefs is not only possible but necessary, and that it requires a basic respect for pluralism that fewer and fewer Americans seem willing to show ... To illustrate the dangerous consequences of what could happen if his plea goes unheeded, French presents a pair of chillingly believable, near-future secessionist scenarios involving California and Texas ... Both seem likelier than a Trumpian repeat of the Reichstag fire predicted by so many commentators.
Marc Weitzmann
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... [an] excellent and chilling report-cum-memoir about one of the most unsettling phenomena in contemporary Europe ... Weitzmann is at his most brilliant when illuminating their [French nationalists and Islamic extremists] ideological cross-pollination. In chapters that read like a guidebook to a perverse intellectual milieu ... Mr. Weitzmann provides a fascinating look into the dark history of the French Nouvelle Droite (\'New Right\') and its Islamist allies, and shows how the Muslim variety of French anti-Semitism has been heavily flavored with extreme right-wing ingredients dating back to the early 19th century.
Peter Shinkle
MixedThe Washington Post\"While the interests of America’s historical record — long bereft of gay history, which is often elusive by nature — may be served by revealing the intimate details of Cutler’s interior life, whether he merits a full-length biography is another matter ... Shinkle’s contribution to history is his revelation that a gay man played an important bureaucratic role in this tragedy by advocating a policy that lowered the threshold for dismissal from disloyalty to homosexuality. There are not many more such previously undisclosed moments in this book, however, much of which treads familiar Cold War history ... Ike’s Mystery Man becomes a genuinely engrossing read in its final third, when Cutler develops a romantic interest in a National Security Council staffer half his age.\
Paul Lendvai
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIn a country as inscrutable as Hungary, Mr. Lendvai makes a valuable guide. His book is more a socio-political history of postcommunist Hungary than a straightforward biography of its leader. At times, however, his distaste for the man he calls the architect of a 'Führer democracy' clouds his analysis ... Mr. Lendvai betrays a haughty contempt for the Hungarian (and, by implication, wider European) voting public, which he slams for credulously accepting Mr. Orbán’s rhetoric on migrants. But Mr. Orbán was 'able to dictate the narrative about refugees' because Europe’s ruling class had ignored the problems associated with migration for so long and derided anyone expressing even mild opposition to it as cryptofascist. This is the only blind spot in an otherwise convincing indictment of Hungary’s prime minister, a man who is becoming increasingly unhinged.
