PositiveThe Washington PostNance...gathered up scraps of evidence to make a persuasive, if circumstantial, case that the president is indeed Moscow’s man in Washington. In essence, it’s a progress report in a mole hunt ... All in all, Nance has produced an impressive clip job, assembling scores of reliable media reports, congressional hearings and the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into a persuasive whodunit narrative. Alas, it remains a circumstantial case. It’s a prosecutor’s pitch to a jury of millions of Americans who don’t get to vote for almost another year.
David Finkel
RaveBookforumHow many ‘walking wounded’—veterans knocked down by post-traumatic stress disorder (mental breakdowns from horrifying events) or TBI (traumatic brain injury)—are there around the country? A half million, more or less, counting the daily drip of suicides and new walk-ins … Embedded with the veterans, their families, their friends, and their counselors, Finkel lights up the lives of these struggling souls, who often compound their real problems by convincing themselves they're ‘weak’ for ‘abandoning’ their buddies and seeking treatment … If Finkel weren't such a vivid, compelling, heartrending writer, you'd never get through his agonizing weave of battles, from the bomb-strewn highways of Iraq to the psycho clinics of VA hospitals and many ruined homes in between. The grim litany of stories collected here brings to mind nothing so much as The Best Years of Our Lives on methamphetamines—with Dana Andrews putting a shotgun to his head in the B-17 scrapyard instead of landing a job. Some endings are happy, more or less, but most not.
Michael V. Hayden
PanThe New York Times Book Review...a surprisingly vivid, albeit acronym-heavy, memoir that probably only a Beltway insider could truly love ... A proud product of blue-collar Pittsburgh, Hayden hints that he would have told far more stories about C.I.A. successes had agency censors let him.
