RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"We often say that a book has changed our lives. But it’s rare to say that a book made us more human. This is a big statement, I know, but This Brilliant Darkness feels as transformative and essential as anything I have read in years. Sharlet’s work is an incantation, a prayer for and summoning of the human powers of observation, empathy, and compassion ... an intimate travelogue of human suffering, confusion, and, in fleeting moments, transcendence ... a wholly hypnotic series of short essays, most of which are accompanied by Sharlet’s tender, bare photos. The easiest comparison is to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s photographic and literary chronicle of impoverished Great Depression farmers. Sharlet’s book, though rooted in the same powerful synergy between images and text, feels even more expansive in its attempt at community ... an eloquent, bracing invitation to look at the human cost of this human suffering.
Jayson Greene
RaveThe Boston Globe..the experience of reading Once More, a masterful literary performance willed together from the shattered mosaic of a family, forced me outside of myself to join Greene in wrestling with the ineffable and with what remains.... Greene offers a raw, luminous portrait of suffering and partial healing, with loss set to hum forever just beneath the surface ... There’s something Homeric about the death of a child. Merely contemplating the awful magnitude of the experience prompts thinking that is both magical and overwrought. Which brings me to one of the book’s most extraordinary aspects. Greene invites readers into his torment in such a quiet way. His writing is stunning, inventive yet unornamented. But where some would summon images of storms and indiscriminate annihilation, Greene deploys piercing intimacies ...[a] beautiful, devastating book.
David Grann
RaveThe Boston Globe...a masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery ... Contained within Grann’s mesmerizing storytelling lies something more than a brisk, satisfying read. Killers of the Flower Moon offers up the Osage killings as emblematic of America’s relationship with its indigenous peoples and the 'culture of killing' that has forever marred that tie.
Alexandra Zapruder
PositiveThe Boston GlobeMaking use of family and government archives, interviews, and her own memory, Alexandra offers a supple, tender portrait of a family lashed to history ... Readers with any sense of sympathy will feel compelled by the book’s defense of the family ... Alexandra makes these connections but misses the fact the film also serves as an origin story for civilian-created records of violence.
Maria Konnikova
MixedThe Boston GlobeKonnikova’s approach both strips much of the majesty from audacious cons and defines confidence schemes too broadly.
