PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... an engaging, capacious and largely celebratory account, presenting the writer, his works and their multimedia adaptations as worthy of serious consideration ... “Spillane” emphasizes the gentler side of its subject, only fleetingly considering the charming writer’s crueller opinions and actions.
Michael Hingston
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Hingston’s dogged research ultimately yields more questions than answers ... Hingston relates their biographies with perception and humour ... Michael Hingston’s captivating history underscores the affinity between Marías’s preoccupations as an artist and the peculiar interplay of the real and fictional that defines the kingdom.
Emily St. John Mandel
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)However \'reality\' is defined, in Mandel’s novels acts of compassion, courage and creativity speak louder than words. These traits remain lifelines amidst the flux of existence ... Gaspery’s empathetic acts in the face of bureaucratic indifference change lives for the better – a timeless message, of course, but also a timely one.
Jeremy Dauber
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal[Dauber] demonstrates in American Comics: A History an assured command of comics’ variety as well as the vast literature they’ve inspired. (There are nearly 90 pages of notes.) His perceptive, critical overview is enlivened by a jaunty style that bops from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in the 1860s to the demise of an equally influential gadfly, Mad magazine, in 2018 ... In contrast to the work-for-hire conditions at big outfits, many underground artists retained copyright, engaged in profit-sharing and pioneered direct distribution. Some of these innovations would be emulated later by the corporations, supporting Mr. Dauber’s provocative contention that the underground’s creative business practices were \'arguably . . . even more revolutionary than the underground’s content.\' The final chapters of American Comics, surveying recent decades, lack some of the cohesion of its early sections.
John Crowley
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)And Go Like This is an eclectic sampler of his characteristic preoccupations cast in realist and fantasy modes. While many of the tales express a faith in existential possibilities being actualized by pragmatic decisions, a few are darker, dramatizing how ageing, disease and other impediments narrow options and constrain potential ... [an] amiable voice, observant detail and compassionate vision[.]
Danny Fingeroth
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... intimate yet balanced ... highlights Lee’s humanity, humor and even humility. But it doesn’t ignore how his canny self-promotion at times shortchanged his collaborators and constrained his own choices. Mr. Fingeroth charts how the ambitious, insecure Stanley Lieber became subsumed by the bombastic Stan Lee, the fictional persona \'steadily evolving from within the real one and becoming the real one\'.
Roberto Bolano, Trans. by Natasha Wimmer
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal\"The Spirit of Science Fiction is structured unconventionally, enticing the reader to solve its mysteries. Bolaño adroitly braids three related narratives ... Heralding things to come when originally written, [the book] remains an entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel.\
Philip Pullman
RaveThe Times Literary SupplementThis cultural turn from metaphysics to metafictions helps to explain why so many readers, young and older, have greeted Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage as if it were the Second Coming ... He [Pullman] is also conversant with postmodernism’s delight in the endless play of signifiers, but doesn’t find that approach helpful when it comes to crafting dynamic, vividly realized tales capable of appealing to all ages ... While Pullman is adept at conveying abstract ideas, he also excels at capturing nuances of character, scene and emotion ... La Belle Sauvage is a thrilling and thought-provoking excursion deeper into this territory – but with a difference.
Mattias Boström
RaveThe Wall Street Journal\"...a timely overview of the great detective’s actual genesis and multiple transformations as a mass cultural icon. As translated from the Swedish by Michael Gallagher, it is a riveting tale involving brilliant artists, cunning criminals, eccentric characters and illuminating moments of tragedy and triumph ... Mr. Boström has expertly unearthed entertaining instances of the sleuth’s diverse appearances in all media, throughout the world ... Running like a tangled skein through this wonderfully entertaining history are the attempts by Conan Doyle and his heirs to control Holmes’s dissemination through copyright law.\
James Gleick
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...[an] exhilarating history ... time travel has become a veritable theme park of playful attractions, which Mr. Gleick explores with infectious gusto ... This may sound ponderous, but Mr. Gleick’s brisk survey is anything but: He is toying with ideas, playing with past and future. He is having fun, and we all know what that does to time.
Thomas Rid
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Rid’s account is less a history of cybernetics as an academic discipline than a cultural history of cybernetics as a peculiarly modern myth ... He lovingly details the military applications of cybernetics, such as the largely automated air-defense system of the 1950s ... Mr. Rid’s fascinating survey of the oscillating hopes and fears expressed by the cybernetic mythos offers an implicit lesson. He is right to find many of its visions excessive—although this should be balanced against the value of bold dreams to inspire innovation.
Glen Weldon
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Weldon’s vividly written history of Batman and his fans is smart, witty and engrossing ... Mr. Weldon has his own essentialist interpretation: underlying all the permutations, Batman is defined by his oath to prevent what happened to him from happening to others. This is the heroic figure who engaged in 'self-rescue' through self-sacrifice, a creature of the night who represents hope rather than darkness. It’s an inspiring conclusion to Mr. Weldon’s Batman v. Nerds.
