PositiveThe New York Times... breezy ... Like the hosts of a reality show, Maddow and Yarvitz step from behind a 47-year-old curtain to inform the former prosecutors what they’ve learned ... while Bag Man the book is considerably more detailed than the podcast, it necessarily lacks a soundtrack for such spontaneous exclamations, and the sordid immediacy of hearing those White House tapes — gems like Nixon talking to Agnew about Beall and asking: \'Is he a good boy? Why the hell did we appoint him?\' ... Maddow and Yarvitz don’t hold back. To read Bag Man is to be reminded how lucky the nation was to be rid of him.
Tracy Daugherty
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"Mr. Daugherty paints a persuasive picture of a young man as an ambitious novelist, feeling the frustration, in draft after draft, of trying to get a book exactly right ... Mr. Daugherty’s subtitle—\'Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society\'—promises a wider subject, but the book sometimes wobbles when Mr. Daugherty approaches the currents of the time. With his focus on Johnson, he misjudges Kennedy ... Fortunately, Mr. Daugherty stays mostly with Billy Lee and his seemingly foreordained downfall.\
David Goldfield
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe aim of The Gifted Generation is to make a reader ask what has been lost, and why … Goldfield...has a romantic view of three presidents who, apart from having been reared in rural America, could not have been less alike … The book that Goldfield set out to write, and finally did write, makes its case. You do not have to be Bernie Sanders to be concerned that among the 21 wealthiest nations, the United States ‘is the only country in which sick days are not required by law.’ On the other hand, it’s not useful to assert that life expectancy in the former East Germany is higher than in the United States … Goldfield is right to point to the risks of government’s increasingly recessive role, and to make one worry how it will play out by the time the millennials become grandparents.
