RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Lévy’s romanticism is more than justified by his almost cosmic ambition: to bring an older reality to the doorstep of a newer one, often from the front lines of the most dangerous places on earth ... what is most striking about these 250 pages of often arresting, always heartfelt prose is the doubt, even despair, that this most self-confident of men is honest enough to disclose. Sometimes the despair is overripe—you sense the author using language to evade his own emotions ... Elsewhere he is less overpolished—simple, sure and almost heartbreaking ... This is a brave book—by a writer looking from within his own constructs and admitting they may no longer be enough ... we need Mr. Lévy’s voice—clear, unconstructed, unconstrained, real—to help us.
James Loeffler
RaveThe Wall Street JournalHuman rights\' has...become a collection of attitudes and sociological signifiers, a vague term to be dismissed by realists and swooned over by idealists. James Loeffler’s book Rooted Cosmopolitans is a bracing and nuanced attempt to correct this—to restore a grave, complex, powerful idea by tracing it to the people, most of them Jews, who argued it into existence ... Mr. Loeffler puts himself not on one side or the other of the divide. What he puts himself against is elision. The question of what rights humans should have based on their humanity is a question of philosophy, of the way people are and how we describe them, and so it should never be not contested. When we stop debating and arguing, we lose the language to account for visceral human realities and needs. That’s a dangerous place to be in, and we may already be there.
Ben Rhodes
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Rhodes’s engaging, disturbing entrée into post-presidential myth-shaping is titled The World as It Is, the assertion of a worldview billed as a statement of reality: Mr. Rhodes, as Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser and all-purpose sounding board, saw the world from a rare height and intends to explain it to us ... Politics for Mr. Rhodes is a dichotomy—the rational and virtuous versus the angry and absurd. His side has ideals. Those who don’t share those ideals have issues: They’re tools of corporate interests; they’re twisted by racism, tribalism and fear of \'the other\'; they’re slaves to the conservative media. Mr. Rhodes has little patience for reasoned argument—he deals in labels—and this saves him the trouble of having to argue for what he believes.
