PositiveThe New Republic\"... a hefty and sturdy two-volume set ... Totaling more than 2,000 pages and more than 900,000 words, bringing together roughly 1,000 letters from 1958 to 2000, Questioning Minds is a monument to the strange and wonderful relationship of two oddballs uniting to make an odd couple ... Questioning Minds is chock-full of countless sentences of like quality: chewy, savory, nutritious.\
Jason Lutes
RaveThe New Republic\"The cartoonist patiently drew his story in short, irregularly released pamphlets, gathered together every few years in paperback collections. When he finally finished the project and codified it in a hefty hardcover in 2018, what had once been antiquarian was now urgent. In the fraying and polarized America of Donald Trump, the Weimar Republic looks more like a mirror than a fading photograph ... When I first started reading Berlin more than two decades ago, I primarily admired it as a bravura feat of historical reconstruction. Everything—the trains, the buildings, the fashion, the faces—looked right, a testament not just to archival research but also, more importantly, to a style that channeled the imagery of the era ... Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters ... The achievement of Lutes’s Berlin is that it combines both sides of the gender divide in urban fiction. In so doing, it offers a more comprehensive way of looking at our own troubled times, which can easily invite despair and resignation.\
Timothy Snyder
MixedThe New Republic...a curious mixture of historical anecdotes and self-help bromides, premised on the idea that America is at the dawn of a tyrannical age, and that the past offers clues for resistance ... On Tyranny starts from a salutary impulse. Snyder is right to think that the discipline of history has special value in strengthening democracy and combating authoritarianism ... It’s also commendable that in On Tyranny, Snyder counsels taking action rather than merely taking refuge in historical comparison ... Yet many of the directives Snyder urges on his readers are a little vague and mystifying. There is a strange disjunction between the gravity of the situation Snyder warns against (Hitler-style tyranny) and the banality of his advice ... Snyder’s advice to Americans is, he tells us, based on his study of repressive regimes. Yet he never explains exactly how he thinks the experience of an American today is comparable to the experience of a Russian in the Soviet Union or a German living under the Third Reich. Nor does he look too closely at the ways these regimes resemble—or do not resemble—one another ... Aside from a smart paragraph about marching, Snyder has nothing useful to say about such democratic resistance ... The best part of On Tyranny is the epilogue, a thoughtful meditation on the fate of history in our moment.
