PositiveChicago Review of BooksGripping ... Bleak ... No part of life stops to give way to any other part. Some questions are solved, some go unanswered, and some will not find their answers until the day after you die.
Colm Toibin
RaveChicago Review of BooksExcellent ... These problems might sound like an unrealistically big and messy tangle of moral dilemmas ... I could end this review by calling Tóibín a keen moral philosopher, but I’ll end it instead with the better compliment of calling him a great novelist who has written another wonderful book.
Martha C. Nussbaum
RaveChicago Review of BooksUrgent ... In this brilliant and accessible work, Nussbaum develops an account of the moral lives of animals that is stronger than other philosophers’ accounts and relevant to the efforts of humans seeking to build a better, more just world for all animals ... Although Justice for Animals is written to address general readers, Nussbaum works through, in lively and accessible fashion, key philosophical questions about animals and ethics ... Nussbaum does not avoid difficult questions ... All readers, not only readers already committed to animal rights, ought to read Nussbaum’s new book. Following Nussbaum’s arguments, we can discover new ways of seeing animals with wonder and compassion. And we can hone our senses of outrage and use that outrage to fuel our efforts to build a better world for all us animals.
Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein
PositiveThe Chicago Review of BooksAlthough In the Margins may appeal most to Ferrante devotees like me eager to read about the ideas of fiction that led to novels like My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter, the book will draw in anyone curious about literature and its creation ... Crucially, Ferrante argues reciprocity in storytelling is important not just at the personal level, but also at the larger cultural and political levels.
Colm Tóibín
RaveChicago Review of BooksTóibín uses a novelist’s tools to present a picture of Mann as a full human figure with darkness and depth ... Tóibín sharpens his picture of Mann by placing him in relation to other major thinkers and artists ... Because Tóibín wants to address readers unfamiliar with Mann, he does not present long reflections on Mann’s novels. Instead, he highlights the events, ideas, and relationships Mann would draw into and transform through his work ... A highlight of the book is Tóibín’s depiction of Mann’s wife, Katia. The daughter of a highly-cultured secular Jewish family, Katia was instrumental in the development of Mann’s art. Furthermore, as Tóibín shows, Katia’s sexuality did not fit neatly into the categories of her time and she supported her husband and children in their diverse sexualities. Writing about Katia, Tóibín puts aside tropes of the poor wife oblivious to her husband’s homoerotic desires ... Part of the pleasure of reading The Magician is seeing how one great writer, Colm Tóibín, imagines the life and work of another great writer, Thomas Mann, in prose as beautiful and vibrant as the older writer deserves ... In The Magician, Colm Tóibín presents a rare view into the making of serious art and, in the process, shows he is a powerful magician himself.
Mikhail Iossel
RaveChicago Review of Books... [an] excellent new collection ... Iossel’s stories of Soviet life...are filled with men and women living second lives, drunks who avoided death (to their distress), and whole families of Soviet citizens who are not killed, not officially, but \'disappeared.\' Death, in these stories, punctuates life like a question mark ... Religion offers hope in the face of oblivion, but, in the officially atheist USSR, its resources are hard to find and hard to know how to use. In \'Necessary Evil,\' one of the funniest stories in this very funny book, the parents of nine-year-old Iossel break the news that he is a Jew. To console the boy, they try to explain Judaism’s rich traditions, but, given their thin education in Jewish history, all they can come up with is a science fiction story ... Iossel’s point is nothing so simple as stories will save us ... Here, stories’ salvific powers are highly contingent ... salvation must involve telling and hearing the stories that make us who we are. Stories like the ones in Love Like Water, Love Like Fire.
Edward McClelland
PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books... excellent .... more than an exciting story of worker Davids knocking down manager Goliaths ... Instead of presenting a step-by-step plan for activism, McClelland tells stories of real men and women facing dire circumstances ... Crucially, McClelland emphasizes the key role women played in the strike, which is often misremembered as a macho standoff between union men on one side and company men on the other ... One dynamic of the Flint story McClelland might have emphasized more is the dynamic of race...McClelland could have added more nuance to his excellent book if he had further explored how dynamics of race enabled or constrained the union in pursuing different goals, strategies, and tactics.
