RaveRolling Stone... a lot like [Teagan and Sara\'s] songs: complexly intimate, smartly crafted, and packing a subtle emotional wallop ... The idea to cut the narrative off just before their career began to take off is refreshing in itself, allowing them to hone in on the kind of personal day-to-day detail most books of this kind seem to roll through merely as a means of setting up the biographical roots of an artist’s rock star myth ... The depictions of aimless, vaguely dangerous, teenage partying (of which they did quite a lot) are especially well-rendered, like something out of a Hold Steady song ... explosively detailed depictions of their earliest experiences trying to find girlfriends are worthy of an excellent YA novel, thanks to Tegan or Sara’s unsparingly real, matter-of-fact prose style ... What emerges is a quietly heroic rock and roll origin story.
Dan Kaufman
PositiveBookforumKaufman ... is refreshingly unburdened by a big-picture theory of ideological apocalypse ... Kaufman thinks the politics have changed, sweepingly—not the folks. From his gumshoe vantage point, he chalks up Wisconsin’s shift to functionaries of moneyed interests, and their strict adherence to a chillingly effective modern GOP playbook. While familiar sad-Springsteen shades of industrial decay sometimes serve as his backdrop, the author doesn’t waste much time hanging around in small-town diners and hardware stores trying to read the soul of #maga America ... This is a book about political power, its seizure, its uses, and its victims—a powerful amassing of tiny stories of struggle and resistance and often defeat against impossible odds ... After an attempt to recall Walker in 2012 failed, the dismantling of the state’s progressive framework ramped up in earnest. Kaufman recounts here through solid research and reportage the ensuing two terms of education rollbacks, safety-net slashing, public-land sell-offs to mining and fracking interests, and top-tier tax cuts that eventually totaled $8 billion ... Kaufman’s post-Walker vignettes are movingly contrasted with flashbacks to Wisconsin’s left-leaning golden age ... Kaufman is at times more on his game as a reporter and historian than as a political analyst. But a lack of pundit omniscience lends his prose an empathically openhearted vibe.
