MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewMcGurl doesn’t interview novel readers. Nor does he data-mine customer reviews (as other literature professors like James F. English and Ed Finn have recently done) or pump publishing professionals for industry details ... Placing Amazon’s story alongside those within the books it distributes, McGurl reduces fictional plots to allegories of the tech behemoth. As insatiable as any zombie, as submissive as any heroine in an \'alpha billionaire romance,\' McGurl’s hypothetical genre-fiction junkie looks diametrically opposed to the skeptical analyst cultivated in college classrooms ... Lurching from roguish biographical anecdotes about Amazon’s gossip-ready founder to coolly pedagogical expositions of Marxist theory, McGurl squelches any hopes that books can save us — from ephemerality, from passivity, from commercialism ... McGurl’s decision to replace close reading with plot summary enables insights ranging from the rise of the trilogy to the motif of the \'beta intellectual.\' However scattershot his evidence, you may still recognize yourself in these disheartening pages.
Leah Price
PositiveBookPage...Price counters the biblio-doomsayers with an incisive look at what the archives reveal about books and reading—then, now and moving forward ... Price takes this affectionate study of the history and future of reading in many disparate directions ... She contemplates the reality that the challenge of reading today is not the availability of books, as it once was, but finding the time to read ... Eye-opening and filled with delightful nuggets of truth, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books offers no nostalgia for a more tranquil reading past but rather a hopeful glimpse into an essential reading future.
Kathryn Hughes
RaveThe New York Times\"While microhistorians have long zoomed in on individual case studies, Hughes pinpoints her subjects even more narrowly ... Hughes’s blow-by-blow accounts of bowel movements, menstruation, menopause, pores and salivary glands shouldn’t be mistaken for celebrity gossip or scatological humor — though it takes guts, so to speak, to depict courtiers fat-shaming one another and guesstimating who had missed a period. Instead, her focus on the body topples great figures from their pedestals. We hear less about the words that emerged from Victoria’s mouth than about her failure to zip her lips while chewing; nothing about the visionary images sparked by Coleridge’s opium addiction, but plenty about his resulting constipation. Made rather than given, these bodies tell an engrossing story about the culture that fashioned them.\
Therese Oneill
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewWith a 4-year-old’s scatological glee, Oneill details the logistics of old-time peeing, pooping, gestating, menstruating and mating ... Oneill has dug up some lovely tidbits from the dustbin of history ... Unmentionable is lavishly illustrated, too: Oneill has an eye for ludicrous images and a penchant for punny captions ... Unfortunately, Oneill’s finds are as padded as Victorian buttocks...Her arch tone seems to suggest that the 21st century has figured out everything the naïve Victorians missed.
