RaveNew York Journal of BooksBoyle has always been adept at creating believable worlds populated by people experiencing high anxiety, and that skill is vividly on display here ... Few novelists are as adept as Boyle at setting balls in motion and playing them out to sometimes grim conclusions. But his books are always entertaining, littered as they are with the minute effluvia of modern American life ... Regular readers of Boyle’s work will be in familiar territory. It certainly doesn’t look like there’s a happy ending in the offing, what with the relentless visitation of fire and rain, but you never know with this literary trickster.
Douglas Rushkoff
MixedThe New York Journal of BooksWhat is surprising is how the book fails to live up to its fascinating subhead...Instead, we get the world according to Professor Douglas Rushkoff, primarily derived from two sources: his fertile brain as it engages with his laptop and brief encounters at the very economic elite/global tech conferences he repeatedly decries in the book. For a man concerned about the future of the world, he sure racks up the frequent flyer miles ... It\'s possible to find a book annoying even though you wholeheartedly agree with its premise ... Rushkoff is (maybe for not much longer) on the A-list as a speaker at events where the elites gather, but he squanders the opportunity such access has given him. The book is, instead, full of the kind of facts about the global elite you can get by Googling ... only barely prescriptive. It’s mostly about ridiculing the rich, and that’s something that Rushkoff—a fairly deft writer—does very well ... An inside scoop, as the book’s title implies, would be useful.
Ian McEwan
RaveNew York Journal of BooksWide-angle and engrossing ... Roland’s chronic inability to get moving should be a liability for the book, but it’s mostly not because he’s a very astute observer, and so much happens around him ... Roland is stagnant and barely moves from his dank apartment in Clapham, but the book is not. McEwan writes so well that the story never flags ... In the end, Roland is a good man. He—or at least the life around him—is compelling company for the 430 pages.
Tom Perrotta
PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksPerrotta is one of the most readable novelists we have ... Everything works here except a ripped-from-the-headlines denouement. Something a little less dramatic would have worked better. Perrotta is a novelist whose best stuff is made of little ultra-realistic moments, not big thriller-type plot development. The ending ties things up a little too neatly when something low-key would have worked better ... a deeply humanist work by a master of observation.
Maggie Shipstead
MixedThe New York Journal of BooksShipstead has fairly good success imagining worlds far away from her own ... The author doesn’t really set time and place in her stories, but this feels like 19th century France. It’s all a bit stilted, but compelling nonetheless ... Not all of Shipstead’s arrows hit their mark, but enough do to keep the pages turning.
Eric Berger
RaveNew York Journal of BooksEric Berger’s Liftoff focuses on the early days of SpaceX, a smart choice, since it offers a vivid window into Elon Musk’s brinksmanship ... Berger chooses to do his reporting through the lens of SpaceX insiders, whose lives are sketched in capsule biographies ... Berger does a good job of sketching the cozy world of rocket science ... Berger does a great job here of not only profiling SpaceX, but also capturing the total brinksmanship of its swashbuckling founder.
Richard Thompson
PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksEvidently an earlier draft of Beeswing was more impressionistic—the publisher pushed for more of a chronological take. It was probably the right call, because the book is very readable. Thompson writes exceptionally well, in a droll, understated, very British way. If he doesn’t fully communicate the depths of his heart, well, okay, it’s a tradeoff for a window into an important period—the birth of British folk-rock ... Thompson’s musical evolution is treated well here ... What is in these pages outweighs what isn’t. If you love music in all its myriad forms, as Thompson does, you’ll love this book. It’s better at song creation (and evolution in the studio) than most memoirs, and it’s hugely informative about the time and the place. Yes, the whole thing is understated, but Thompson still tells a fine old story—and the book is full of good crack, as the Irish say.
Mary-Beth Hughes
MixedNew York Journal of BooksThe short stories in Mary-Beth Hughes’ collection The Ocean House are linked, not by the titular manse [...] but, tentatively, by people. The central character in one story will show up, obliquely, in the next ... It can be an effective technique. Is it universally effective here? Unfortunately, no, though it succeeds often enough that the reader wants it to be better ... Hughes’ literary gifts are obvious. Although she eschews quotation marks, she has a great ear for the way people talk, and the stories are rich in their construction, full of the little details that add up to a life. But many are difficult and not very accessible ... If you read just one of these stories in a magazine, you’d want to find the collection that houses it. But many of the tales begin in obscurity and never fully emerge ... More straightforward story telling would bring some of these stories to vibrant life. Hughes clearly has the talent to create a memorable collection.
Amelia Pang
MixedNew York Journal of BooksThe existence of labor camps in China that assemble products for western companies is not itself a revelation, but Pang has produced a very well-written and researched account of how they operate, and doesn’t ignore the human dimension. Her main subject is the man who wrote that note, Sun Yi, once a promising and favored university graduate, but brought down by his adherence to the seemingly innocuous Falun Gong organization ... While not a religion per se, it has some core beliefs, including—as Pang notes—opposition to abortion, LGBT rights and, in some cases modern medical care. Members are encouraged not to drink, use drugs, or engage in premarital sex. And this is where Pang’s book gets a little problematic. She is an excellent journalist, with an impressive track record, and not a member of the group herself ... The Epoch Times is a leading proponent of the “stolen Presidential election” claim, and considered the contest undecided for many weeks after the vote ... It is sure that Pang knows all this, but it should be within the pages of her book.
Abigail Dean
MixedNew York Journal of BooksLet’s face it, a book centered around the wretched child abuse of a large family at the hands of a demented religious fanatic has some inherent drama to it. The reader is going to want to find out what happens to those poor kids. But what if the author purposely sets out to withhold revelations until practically the last page? ... Gradually, we piece the story together, but the book is half over before that happens ... Virtually none of the characters is likeable ... The book gathers some force in the last quarter of its 342 pages ... We get a sense of what this book could have been if it had been structured differently.
David Byrne
MixedNew York Journal of BoosYou’re buying a lot of white space ... the book’s structure reduces the good news to isolated platitudes ... it stopped making sense ... the book is whimsical. If it’s on a friend’s coffee table, you’ll have an amusing two minutes with it. But they’re asking $24 for the hardcover. The money might be better spent on Byrne’s How Music Works, which offers plenty of insights ... my guess is that only Byrne completists need to buy the book.
