RaveThe Wall Street JournalIf the plot is pedestrian, Mr. Nicholls keeps it going at a near-sprint, creating delightful agony for the reader ... Snappy banter and Mr. Nicholls’s endless supply of witty and literate observations make every page a pleasure ... Lightweight? Sure, but exactly the proper weight for a book that glides so elegantly to its destination.
Daniel de Visé
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. de Visé’s book, though awkwardly written... races along on a whoosh of marvelous details and crackling anecdotes.
David Mamet
RaveThe Wall Street JournalA short, chatty, discursive book padded with the author’s comic doodle ... Mamet has a fine cache of Hollywood quips and one-liners, passed along from one smart-aleck to the next ... Nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book.
Hermione Lee
PositiveThe New Criterion... definitive ... a case study in the joy and gratitude that comes, or ought to, with being English ... A small-type listing of Stoppard’s credits covers nearly two pages, yet Lee makes room for at least a brief discussion of seemingly every project, even some of no consequence ... It’s refreshing that Lee avoids the biographer’s trap of subject-loathing ... One finishes the book in a state of immense gratitude that Stoppard exists.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
PositiveThe National Review...a brief, beautiful, deeply felt [book], saturated with meaning ... Michael rejects most of the assumptions of our modern consumerist condition and hence rejects its defining registers of hipness and irony. Instead he lays bare his emotions, the yearning he felt growing up with a single mom ... Michael’s welter of feelings about his ancestry and his father are the basis of this book ... Michael doesn’t so much argue as feel that some combination of materialism, technocracy, and individualism is carrying us away from our purpose. He finds his in his faith, his family, his Irishness, his determination to be conscious of past, present, and future.
