PositiveThe Washington PostCallahan refloats unfounded claims that suggest both JFK and Robert F. Kennedy were somehow involved in Marilyn Monroe’s suicide ... Callahan has a good eye for lurid details ... The anecdotes that make up this book are not news, but Callahan strings them together in a way that makes the House of Kennedy look like Bluebeard’s castle of horrors.
Michael Wolff
MixedThe New RepublicWolff’s prediction that Murdoch’s death will signal \'the end of Fox News\' is shaky, since his own book shows again and again how Fox succeeds not because of Rupert Murdoch but in spite of him ... Wolff has been embedded in the trenches of Fox for a while, surfacing with a haul of filthy quotes and anecdotes sewn together with casually insulting insights ... Perhaps because there is no believable end to Fox in sight, the book’s conclusion feels rather weak.
Jamie MacKay
RaveAir MailJamie Mackay’s book fills in the lines with a history of Sicily as lush and vibrant as the mountainous little dot where ancient Greeks, Africans, Arabs, and Northern Europeans have clashed, coexisted, and interbred over millennia.
Sonia Faleiro
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe story she weaves in exquisite language is as tragic and ugly as it is engrossing ... This story is at heart a Southern Gothic—a Southern Hemisphere Gothic—a tale of stymied sexuality and buried secrets ... The events of the night the girls died are related by a cast of dubious witnesses, secretive family members and drunken and abusive police officers, all of whom Faleiro interviews and brings to life on the page ... The Good Girls is a puzzle with a surprise at the end. It’s a riveting, terrible tale, one all too common, but Faleiro’s gorgeous prose makes it bearable ... This feminist document looks straight at men’s twisted obsession with controlling female sexuality.
Meghan Daum
PositiveNewsweekDaum\'s writing is brave and engaging; she does some hard thinking about our times and demands that we do too. Crucially, her insistence on nuance distinguishes her from people on both sides of Trump-era America: She is entirely willing to admit that she doesn\'t know if she\'s right.
Cristina De Stefano, Trans. by Marina Harss
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...Cristina De Stefano’s new biography of the Italian journalistic superstar Oriana Fallaci — unabashed hagiography to counter the writer’s late-life reputational demise — must suffice ...Fallaci was a piquant, stylish beauty, self-consciously photogenic in the Joan Didion way, a midcentury woman writer vigilant about her public image ...De Stefano, who had access to living friends, family members and colleagues as well as archives and letters, reveals another side to her life — long periods of self-imposed emotional and actual isolation to devote herself to writing, interspersed with anguished affairs ... De Stefano doesn’t excuse her subject’s intolerance, but she does put it in context.
Ingrid Betancourt
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...although Julia’s unusual powers might seem a clever way to convey the messy personal price of a larger national evil, the suspension of disbelief required by her 'special gift' becomes an unfortunate distraction from what might have been a revealing examination of how fascism works and what it does to its victims.
