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Recent Reviews
Rachel Louise Martin
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"Martin’s book provided the disturbing, destabilizing experience of being thrust back into a period of intense racial hatred as if it were happening in real time. It is one thing to recall famous photographs of police dogs set loose on child marchers during the civil rights movement, or of lynch mobs picnicking around a still-hanging corpse. It is another to be confronted with a meticulous, day-by-day reconstruction of relentless bigotry in action. Nearly every page of Martin’s book brings to life the atrocities inflicted upon Black children and parents, and a handful of white allies, in the town of Clinton, Tenn., during the year after its high school desegregated under a federal court order ... Martin deserves particular credit for excavating a piece of school-desegregation history that, despite having been covered by national news outlets at the time, has since been overlooked in favor of better-known battles like those in Little Rock and Boston ... given the constant threat of racism to our democracy, including worsening school segregation in districts across the country and the bans in certain states on books about systemic inequality, who is to say that Martin is wrong to leave her readers so overwhelmed by despair?\
Bradford Pearson
Positive The Washington Post ... Bradford Pearson has uncovered an absolutely stirring story in his rigorous and important, though flawed, new book, The Eagles of Heart Mountain ... Pearson wisely wants to situate the Eagles within the broader context of anti-Japanese racism before and during the war. The problem is that the context crowds out the primary story line. Though a reader meets Nomura and Yoshinaga in the first several dozen pages of the book, and though they intermittently reappear amid the lengthy historical portions, they slide too much into the background until the riveting final third of the book. That is a long time for a book of narrative nonfiction to go without focusing on its protagonists.To his credit, Pearson has done prodigious research on the bigoted path toward incarceration ... But the sheer volume of historical background in The Eagles of Heart Mountain buries its most singular material. And, even on its own terms, the contextual chapters suffer from disorganization, looping forward and back in time in a disorienting way.
Nikita Stewart
Mixed The New York Times Book Review I do not mean in any way to diminish Stewart’s impressive journalistic skills when I wonder if this book would have existed without the boldface-name buzz that Troop 6000 received. Indeed, the publisher has packaged this book as a feel-good yarn, complete with a hyperbolic subtitle about how the homeless girls \'inspired the world\' ... To her great credit, Stewart has too much integrity and clarity to go along with the fairy-tale version of Troop 6000’s experience. She problematizes the myth, relentlessly returning to the debilitating chaos of homelessness itself ... Yet Stewart also has to struggle with the result of her own article. Troop 6000 was only several months into existence at that point. What would have been the more normal, gradual and genuine effort to build and maintain a Girl Scout troop in extremis was overwhelmed by its instant vogue. Any journalist or author who practices immersion reporting has to worry about the effect of his, her, or their presence on the subjects and events being observed. But in my decades of experience, I have never encountered a more nettlesome example than Troop 6000 ... [Stewart] dutifully describes the Cinderella episodes the girls and parents of Troop 6000 enjoy, but she refuses to avert her eyes from their precarious lives ... How does one accurately depict incessant disorder without the writing itself turning disorderly? Stewart has not solved that problem. She splinters her book into 26 chapters and each chapter into multiple scenes; she flits from character to character, event to event, often failing to build depth or sustain narrative drive. One unintended result is that, in a book illuminating the life-changing power of scouting, none of the girls in Troop 6000 wind up being nearly as memorable for a reader as Giselle Burgess and several other adults.
Albert Samaha
Positive The New York Times Book Review Does a game like football offer lifesaving discipline, fatherly coaches and means to a scholarship? Or is it just a cruel chimera, holding out the allure of an elusive pro career? ... In plumbing these profound questions, Samaha immerses himself with the Mo Better Jaguars ... Some of his finest character portraits of coaches and parents turn up only toward the book’s end ... Even so, there is much to enjoy and at the best moments to admire in this book.
David Giffels
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... a book that is tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought ... For better or worse, Furnishing Eternity is very much a guys’ book. The emotional center rests on Giffels’s relationships with his father, a retired civil engineer whose life force exerts itself in the workshop, and with his best friend ... With a writer as talented as Giffels, though, this reader could accept the bromances and the gender essentialism as the prices of an emotionally satisfying narrative ...Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through action. Only a very skilled engineer of a writer can transform the fits and starts, the fitted corners and sudden gouges of the assembly process into a kind of page-turning drama. And only a wise writer can resist the temptation to deliver a formulaic epiphany at book’s end.
Marjorie J. Spruill
Positive The Washington Post The many admirers of Mrs. America who have pondered its factual basis...will find great satisfaction in Spruill’s book. It may not be a page-turner, but it is a clear, compelling and deeply insightful volume ... Spruill’s book leaves one struggling to reconcile Schlafly’s intelligence—Phi Beta Kappa, master’s from Radcliffe, law degree from Washington University—with her talent for demagoguery. In its epilogue, though, Divided We Stand has no doubt about her lasting effect on the Republican Party and the nation as a whole.