PositiveThe New YorkerMcMurtry emerges as a perpetually ambivalent figure, one who eventually became a part of the mythology that he insisted he was attempting to dismantle ... Daugherty’s biography is full of entertaining cameos ... But the anecdotes, many of them drawn from McMurtry’s own writing about his life, can feel like a shield. A deeper sense of McMurtry remains elusive throughout the biography; he comes across as a hard man to get to know well ... The final third of Daugherty’s book makes for bleak reading.
Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGee and Anguiano have a clear affection for the area’s \'sun-speckled, dirt-road lifestyle\' and its idiosyncratic inhabitants ... The heart of the book, though, is the individual stories of bravery and tragedy that played out in Paradise and its neighboring communities as the Camp Fire raged ... The horror of the fire’s relentless advance is viscerally evoked, although the details sometimes verge on unbearable ... The authors temper the horror with stories of heroism and rescue ... It was unnerving, if also perversely captivating, to read this account of the Paradise disaster while in the midst of our current, slower-moving catastrophe. There are uncanny moments of resonance ... has the narrative propulsion and granular detail of the best breaking-news disaster journalism; while the authors include some historical context, they largely refrain from in-depth analysis or attempts to draw broader conclusions from the tragedy. The main takeaway from their book is sobering: As many parts of the world get hotter and drier, we will likely see more fires as destructive as the one in Paradise.
Sarah Weinman
PositiveBookforumThe Real Lolita makes up for the Horner-shaped lacuna in its center by a deft and thorough depiction of the mid-century suburban context of both Horner’s abduction and Nabokov’s novel. It was an atmosphere of pervasive victim-blaming, even when the victim was a child ... In The Real Lolita, Weinman hasn’t brought Horner back to life—that would be impossible—but she’s gone a long way toward making it clear what’s lost when such stories aren’t told.
Jeff Guinn
MixedBookforumGuinn’s book, which follows Jones from his birth in Indiana to that last stand in Jonestown, is an attempt to explain how the preacher, a Marxist who studied Gandhi and committed himself to fighting racism and improving people’s lives, wound up becoming a man who ordered beatings and confinements for those who disobeyed him … His account of Jonestown, too, seems driven by an effort to make sense of what is by most standards a senseless situation. This is a strength as well as a weakness … Guinn occasionally overpsychologizes his subject, as if any childhood experience—a fascination with Hitler, an unpopular mother—could explain why Jim Jones became Jim Jones. This is a common trap—seeing authoritarian groups as existing within a vacuum and explaining them through the particular pathologies and charisma of their leaders. But that’s exactly what Jim Jones wanted: to exist inside a bubble that was entirely within his control.
