PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA useful reminder that America’s omniscience is just as likely to be overestimated as are the capabilities and intentions of most world actors ... A more intimate picture of the dictator’s thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before ... The Achilles Trap is occasionally weighed down by the giddiness of a journalist with a giant stack of previously unreported items ... Still, most of the story is vivid and sometimes even funny.
Michael D'Antonio
MixedThe New York Times Book Review[D\'Antonio] is a fluid writer, responsible summarizer and diligent researcher. This volume is a comprehensive history of the way right-wing attacks have both replicated and morphed over the decades, and across technologies ... But the book is most successful as a work within the terms of its chosen genre: Clinton defense. Just as the Clinton prosecution — in the manner of Edward Klein and Peter Schweizer — is a recognizable literary category (one to which D’Antonio rightly draws critical attention), so is Clinton defense. (The defense is less given to magical realism; D’Antonio writes factually and journalistically) ... This book goes over a lot of familiar biographical terrain but is at its most interesting when it relates the details of the complicated, twisty scandals that have been hyped up and then boiled down into catchphrases: Whitewater, Benghazi, the email server. Still, anything that happened in Clinton’s career between the moments when she was most fervidly pursued by the right is skirted over quickly, unsatisfyingly ... D’Antonio does a certain amount of feminist-inflected analysis in his text, particularly in the early biographical chapters ... It’s impossible to argue with the substance of this — misogyny is hypermagnetized toward Clinton, not to mention virtually every woman in politics or the public eye — but it’s a comment that’s certainly been made before. And in places, D’Antonio seems a little blinkered from noticing sexism that doesn’t target Clinton herself. He isn’t particularly generous or thoughtful in his assessment of the way the media treated women like Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, or Juanita Broaddrick, who made a credible accusation of rape against Bill Clinton that has, in recent years, become the subject of much feminist reconsideration ... The fact of Bill Clinton’s unfaithfulness is mostly used as a launching point for discussing the right’s exploitation of it. D’Antonio can rarely bring himself to admit the couple have legitimate baggage ... It’s understandable that D’Antonio might shy away from anything that would seem to feed the trolls — more than three years after Clinton’s loss, in the midst of a world-historical pandemic and impending economic ruin, several of the most-shared “news” stories on Facebook in March involved Hillary Clinton’s emails — but there is little room in this book for considering that the Hillary Clinton story, in all its complicated richness and particularity, may not best be presented as a chapter from the Lives of the Martyrs.
Jhumpa Lahiri
MixedThe New RepublicPerhaps Lahiri was worried that she was becoming predictable, because she’s chosen to make this novel more grandiose than her previous work, with capital S-serious historical context and a rather soap-operatic plotline … Lahiri’s writing...seems to be elegant to a fault. I have no doubt that Lahiri has imagined a deep inner life for Gauri, but she can’t quite bring herself to break form enough to explicate it. The sentences, like her characters, remain crystalline and rhythmic and detached … Still, the novel is, despite its flaws, an absorbing one.
