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Recent Reviews
Tom Sancton
Rave The Washington Post ... may begin like a James Bond movie, but the book is a multi-generational history rather than a true-crime story ... As it happens, the author succeeds in telling his tale without artifice or invention because even the most exotic and breathtaking details are supplied in abundance by the case itself ... No less fascinating is the parallel account of the gang that carried out the crime ... a book about the flash points in family, business, politics and diplomacy. At the same time, much of the narrative amounts to an expertly told and richly detailed police procedural. Above all, it is a wholly authentic thriller. For that reason, and out of deference to the author and his readers, the denouement cannot be revealed here.
Dan Gretton
Rave The Washington Post ... it is much more than a history of bureaucratic crime. Rather, Gretton has written himself deeply and intimately into the work, which also serves as a poignant memoir; a travelogue that leads the reader through time and space, history and memory; and an extended exercise in observation and introspection ... Perhaps the most urgent point that Gretton seeks to make, and the one that elevates his book from a work of history and memoir to a manifesto, is that the example of desk killers in the Holocaust must be seen as a moral caution against complacency and complicity in our own lives and our own times.
Timothy Snyder
Rave Jewish Journal What kept Snyder alive—and what makes Our Malady such a compelling book to read and ponder—is precisely the same potent emotion that Dylan Thomas conjured when he famously urged his father to \'rage against the dying of the light\' in his single best-remembered poem ... Facts are the stock-in-trade of historians, if not politicians, and Snyder confronts us with hard data, much of it unexpected and unsettling ... Snyder is a relentless truth-teller ... On Tyranny was explicitly about the threat to freedom in America in the age of Donald Trump. Our Malady makes the argument that \'[i]f our federal government and our commercial medicine make us unhealthy, they are making us unfree.\' In that sense, these two books are companion volumes, and they call on us to wake up and pay attention before it is too late.
Debbie Cenziper
Rave The Washington Post Cenziper brought her investigative skills to bear on the challenge of retrieving the hard facts, but she also possesses the gift of a storyteller. For that reason, Citizen 865 is a work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller ... a highly significant work of investigation that is eye-opening and heartbreaking. She compels us to confront the crimes of the Trawniki men in a way that burns itself into both memory and history.
Peter Finn
Rave The Washington Post ...[a] tale Finn tells so compellingly ... factual precision and tense storytelling is on display in A Guest of the Reich, which offers an insider’s perspective on an aspect of Nazi Germany that has mostly escaped the attention of historians and journalists ... Legendre’s ordeal in German captivity is described in harrowing detail but also with an acute grasp of the physical and psychological trials that the Nazis inflicted on their prisoners ... As fascinating as Finn’s account has been...her experiences in the last days of the war—and the act of courage that finally led to her liberation—are worthy of the Hollywood contract that Legendre reportedly dreamed of. As much as we know about World War II, A Guest of the Reich satisfies the reader’s curiosity about what actually happened to the Americans who found themselves on the ground in Nazi Germany during wartime. In that sense, Finn’s book occupies some of the same terrain as Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. Yet, just as Legendre herself was a unique figure in history, her saga is like no other that has so far reached us out of the belly of the beast.
Andrew Nagorski
Rave The Washington Post Nagorski makes his argument in vivid and compelling detail, and his book is laced with bitter irony ... turns out to be a book about how wrong a dictator can be when planning and making war ... Thanks to his mastery of historical sources and his acute insight into when, why and how decisions are made in real life, he is able to make a credible argument that 1941 was a turning point, if not exactly the turning point, of World War II in Europe. But a hard truth is always apparent just beneath the surface of his argument and his analysis: It is impossible to predict what turns out to be inevitable, which makes 1941 an essential text and a healthy caution for the war planners in Washington today.
Anne Frank
Rave The Jewish Journal Both a challenge and a wonderment ... serves as a companion volume to — and, really, a midrash on — Anne Frank’s immortal memoir, and the book stands on its own as a work of art, sometimes disturbing but always illuminating ... Folman and Polonsky have reclaimed Anne Frank in all of her humanity, and they allow us to witness for ourselves her beauty, courage, vision and imagination, all of the qualities that make her life and early death so heartbreaking. And, in doing so, they have elevated the tools of the comic book to create an astonishing work of art.
David Wroblewski
Rave The Los Angeles Times By borrowing the plot of the most famous play in history, Wroblewski is sacrificing much of the suspense; after all, we know how Hamlet ends. To compensate, Wroblewski seeks to impress the reader with feats of literary legerdemain … The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is, all at once, a mystery, a thriller, a ghost story and a literary tour de force. Just as the Sawtelles seek inner meaning in the bloodlines of a dog, the author invites us to see signs and portents in every tragedy that befalls the star-crossed family … The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is an authentic epic, long and lush, full of back story and observed detail.
Andrew Nagorski
Positive The Washington Post Much of Nagorski’s evidence is archival, but he has also found his way to some firsthand testimony from the last surviving participants in the war-crimes trials ... [a] deep and sweeping account of a relentless search for justice that began in 1945 and is only now coming to an end.