PositiveThe New Republic...Treglown’s careful study of Hersey’s life and work helps shed light on a time as distant and mythic to us today as the Wild West was to Hersey. Mr. Straight Arrow stands out in Treglown’s biography as a writer of empathy and curiosity, a writer whose plain style conveyed the desperate struggle for survival and dignity in the face of oppression, violence, and political chaos. ... Treglown’s engaging biography brings to life crucial decades of the \'American Century\' in all their fraught complexity, decades that we must reexamine in order to understand how we’ve gotten where we are today ... Close attention to the specific details of complex global events is a wedge that can be driven into the seemingly inevitable progression of the past, and might also help us perceive turning points in the present. Such careful attention was a hallmark of Hersey’s writing, as it is of Treglown’s. It is an example worth following.
Bill McKibben
PanLos Angeles Review of BooksThe threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a \'game,\' especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense ... When [McKibben] turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption ... McKibben’s book is breezy and rambling ... In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into...vague preaching ... The all-too-real possibility we must confront—and which...Bill McKibben notably refuse[s]—is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.
David Wallace-Wells
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a \'game,\' especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense. And while thinkers such as John von Neumann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Caillois, and Johan Huizinga have all used the idea of games to explore what it means to be human, McKibben doesn’t seem to care much about how games actually work. Rather, he seems to want to use the idea of the \'human game\' as a secular framework for conceptualizing human values ... When [McKibben] turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption ... breezy and rambling ... a stupefying mix of cheerleading, moral hectoring, and small-is-beautiful nostalgia ... The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which Bill McKibben notably refuse[s] — is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.
Ahmed Saadawi, Trans. by Jonathan Wright
RaveThe New RepublicThe monster is a powerful metaphor, but the real reason the novel works is because Saadawi writes with a rare combination of generosity, cruelty, and black humor. He has a journalist’s eye for detail and a cartoonist’s sense of satire (he’s been both). What the reader comes away remembering are not the fantastic elements in the story, but the day-to-day struggles of Baghdadis.
