RaveThe GuardianThese essays, which he couldn\'t write down for himself, are nevertheless wonderfully written. They capture his 1950s childhood in Putney, the dour, didactic direct grammar school that drove him on to Cambridge, his days of devotion and disillusion on a joyless kibbutz, his restless trek from one university and one country to another – and one wife to another – until New York finally came to seem like home. And Judt, start to finish, could never write a boring sentence ... Tony Judt, in short, was a mass of contradictions, a polemicist as well as a prophet, a philosopher as well as a pamphleteer; but, most of all, through these pages, he emerges as a wellspring of enlightenment you need to spend time with.
David E Hoffman
PositiveThe Guardian\"Hoffman lets his saga of war and peace unroll through the eyes of those on both sides who were there at the time. In particular, tramping the length and breadth of the old USSR, he tells us how a fading, failing Kremlin leadership consistently feared an American strike that Reagan, of course, knew wasn\'t coming ... No: Hoffman\'s magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time doesn\'t stop in 1991.\
Glen David Gold
PositiveThe GuardianGold's real aim is to recapture the lost era of the great illusionists and escapologists, of Houdini, Thurston and Devant, to evoke the time when audiences believed what they saw; a time when real magic was somehow possible and its prime purveyors were among the most famous people on earth. And his plot — garish, crude, infernally clever — is precisely honed to the task: it is a triumph of misdirection, a nest of boxes constantly springing fresh surprises … This is the most exuberant stew of a novel: strange, tasty, addictive. Do we ever know its central protagonist, the man who called himself Carter the Great? No, not quite; but then, he was a man of mystery when two dollars bought you an evening of miracles.
