PositiveThe NationalIf ever an author could claim licence to indulge in self-dramatising profundities about the agonies of exilic consciousness, Danticat would qualify - but her posture here is modest, without any hint of pretension. Some of the pieces are personal essays; others are critical reflections on the work of Haitian writers and artists who worked as emigrants. The difference in focus does not involve a difference in tone, however. In either genre, Danticat registers an acute awareness that dislocation or relocation are, after all, common experiences ... Danticat takes her title, Create Dangerously, from a lecture by Albert Camus. Employed by someone else the phrase might sound bombastic, but here there is a constant tension between the author\'s sense of creativity as a possible moral force in the world and her uncertainty about ever finding a place in it ... She avoids grandiose claims about the insightfulness of the exile - while honouring the complexity of the immigrant artist\'s role, with its precariousness and its drive to make connections.
Lisa Duggan
PositiveInside Higher EducationLisa Duggan gets it exactly right in Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (University of California Press) when she writes that Rand\'s \'particular gift was not for philosophical elaboration, but for stark condensation and aphorism\' ... The prolonged and cumulative effect of Rand\'s influence, as it emerges from Duggan\'s account, has been a multigenerational training of the sentiments in the principle that aspiration and drive are not enough—that real success is transcendental superiority, a state of absolute and deeply committed indifference to others and to any notion of a common humanity that will continue beyond one\'s own death.
Peter Martin
PositiveInside Higher EdMartin has read his way through yards of books and pamphlets...though the story also requires him to document numerous business transactions and personal vendettas going on outside the public’s view. The disputes are not now of uniform interest. But once the author steps back for a moment to indicate how closely the American mass media of the day was following the conflict, the level of detail becomes compelling.
