PositiveThe Boston Globe\"About midway through the book the inimitable Sedaris voice we all know starts to emerge. The anecdotes grow more artfully, antically shaped. His reactions to all the strange people and incidents that come his way make him open up to the reader a little more ... Loving portraits of all his family members are threaded through the book, no matter how outrageous or distressing their behavior is. His reactions to world events go from being telegraphic to expansive. The keenest moment comes at a 9/11 memorial service in Paris when he realizes just how far from New York and Raleigh he is. \'[W]hatever else Paris might be, this is not our home, it’s just the place where we have our jobs or apartments. How could we have forgotten that?\' Passages like that make you eager for volume two.\
Paul Staiti
PositiveThe Washington PostOf Arms and Artists brings those turbulent negotiations to volatile life, while delivering unexpected ironies ... The book is furnished with 16 pages of handsome color plates, which give some notion of the paintings’ quality. It also supplies black-and-white reproductions of them on the pages where they’re mentioned, for handy reference ... Staiti, in casting an analytical eye on the paintings, can’t always compete with the dramatic lives he’s recounting. But he does drive home two points very effectively. First, the art of the American Revolution was as much about 'spin' as documentation...Second, bitter conflicts between the Founding Fathers could give our present-day Congress a run for its money.
