MixedOpen Letters ReviewThe Einstein Vendetta equips itself with a would-be poignant tale, but only dabbles perfunctorily with that tale’s seriousness, and defuses a potentially explosive book with anodyne prose.
PositiveOpen LettersThough Boyd giggles atop a successful oeuvre, The Predicament works hard so as to be read as an isolated new entity whilst smothering us all with the genre’s regular archetypes ... Judged aside from its subject matter, The Predicament bobs afloat some gainfully readable prose ... Despite the stylistic clangers and the unbelievable way in which a flimsy litterateur is said to suddenly outdo the CIA, The Predicament will definitely have both Boyd’s faithful clientele and more casual readers of his output speeding - mouth agape - to its tense conclusion.
PositiveOpen LettersVolker Ullrich’s new book Fateful Hours, translated into English by Jefferson Chase, lines up the culprits in a fact-packed and conventional narrative sprinting from the concession of the Great War in 1918 to Hitler’s woeful promotion to Reich Chancellor in 1933. The current President of the United States, in all his slobbering vicious stupidity, also plays a hellish connotative cameo role ... Ullrich is at his most poignant when he explains how other participants on the Right believed their enemy\'s enemy was their friend, looking to spur on the Hitlerian horse, content to compartmentalise the warning signs as long as their ultimate aims were met ... Many sections in Fateful Hours will jolt and chill perceptive readers with their contemporaneity.
PositiveOpen Letters ReviewKnowledgeable and cockily erudite ... If a criticism is to be piped atop these explanations, it must be noted how akin they are to Malcolm Gladwell’s random, preference-led gobbets. Lunging from the brilliant to the flashily invalid ... All Consuming is a book for the gastronomically super-literate ... It’s one thing to broaden the public’s culinary horizons, it’s quite another to nuke their worlds with exotica ... Readers are certain to love Tandoh’s wry, subversive, zanily astute writing style ... It is in her smaller, more acidic put-downs where true entertainment can be found ... Throughout she contains this smirkful, cutting wisdom so well that the book isn’t pungent with cynicism, but is one still willing to satirise anything in the food industry ... It fascinates as much as it flummoxes, but best of all it allows a writerly talent to excel in her field without a calorie being counted.
