PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIcebound is a fascinating modern telling of Barents’s expeditions. The book faces limitations due to its very old source material ... Icebound while fluid in its telling and thorough in its research, necessarily lacks the human element of the greatest adventure tales. This is not to gainsay the book’s drama. Ms. Pitzer presents a compelling narrative situated in the context of Dutch imperial ambition. She writes vividly about the \'unnerving isolation\' of venturing north and east of Scandinavia into uncharted waters.
Corey Robin
PositiveThe Atlantic...[a] provocative new book ... At the heart of Robin’s book is this extraordinary argument: Thomas \'sees something of value in the social worlds of slavery and Jim Crow,\' not because he endorses bondage \'but because he believes that under those regimes African Americans developed virtues of independence and habits of responsibility, practices of self-control and institutions of patriarchal self-help, that enabled them to survive and sometimes flourish\' ... Thomas has written vividly about \'the totalitarianism of segregation\' and \'the dark oppressive cloud of governmentally sanctioned bigotry.\' Robin collects and quotes these lines, but they don’t deter him from painting their author as an upside-of-slavery kind of judge ... Still, Robin is not hurling insults. He is deconstructing a sphinx, and his point carries the uncomfortable ring of truth. If Thomas wants to take America back to its founding, that project entails reconciling slavery and the law ... The Enigma of Clarence Thomas...deserves credit for attempting to understand the worldview of a jurist who at times can seem almost willfully perverse.
