PositiveThe London Review of BooksMislaid slots itself into some of the most familiar subcategories of American literary fiction ... It’s a joke about all the kinds of novel that Americans already know and love. This is why it was such effective agent bait – Zink got a very big advance ... Mislaid is not primarily or even secondarily an earnest attempt to think about racism or the prison-industrial complex, but Zink knows what’s going on, and occasionally says so ... The rapid pace at which these first two novels were written suggests a graphomania that hasn’t yet had the chance to take satisfaction in its freedom. Zink fires all over the place, which makes it all the more impressive that her shots usually land. She has yet to identify a favourite among the many fictional worlds available to her, and she may decide it’s not worth picking a favourite at all. She can probably figure some of this out by writing and publishing a dozen books in the next 18 months.
George Packer
MixedBookforumOur Man exhaustively documents Holbrooke’s not-quite-greatness, from his egotism and striving to his failed relationships to his inability to understand himself. In addition, the book unintentionally documents that Holbrooke, in addition to being not quite great, was not quite interesting ... The interesting voice in Our Man belongs to Packer, not Holbrooke. Packer constantly asserts his authorial presence, not just as narrator, but as witness, moralist, one-man Greek chorus, and mourner. He is anguished over the breakdown of the post–World War II consensus, and Our Man is a long attempt to explain that breakdown and give it meaning. There is a boyish quality to his writing. Analogies to sports or adventuring proliferate ... He criticizes a lot about American foreign policy over the past fifty years...but he cannot bring himself to question America’s motives ... This belief in both the universality and the benevolence of US interests is false, and it is blinding Packer...and most of the Democratic presidential field to reality ... The question facing many of us now is whether an economy and society organized around exploitation both at home and abroad can be replaced with something better. If liberals like Packer...remain unwilling to participate in the debate on these terms, they will have no constructive role to play going forward.
Daniel Immerwahr
MixedBookforum[Immerwahr\'s] book has caused some excitement among people who study and write about empire professionally. This isn’t the kind of perspective one usually finds in mainstream histories of the United States ... The book’s second half narrates the transformation of American empire that occurred after the Second World War, as the US assumed its place as world hegemon. Immerwahr is less successful here because he runs into the limits of his anecdotal approach ... Immerwahr’s account has observational value but little explanatory power. He never acknowledges or analyzes the engine of postwar American empire, which is the country’s self-assigned mission to keep the world safe for capitalism. An unrealized awareness of this mission suffuses the book’s second half, especially in the discussion of industrial standards (you want everyone’s screws to be the same size so that you can buy and sell industrial parts anywhere in the world). But the actual word capitalism appears only once in more than four hundred pages, and it’s in a quote from someone else ... Empire, as a subject, requires exactly the kind of geopolitical thinking that is missing from this book. Immerwahr seeks refuge in the details, but without an overarching idea about what the military bases and interventions are for, all you’re left with is a picture of a bunch of different places on a map.
