RaveThe Telegraph... this book brings a lost world to light and skilfully places Washington – statesman, general, family man, lover – firmly in it. The dates and appointments of Washington’s career are well known, but Chernow presents a fresh analysis at every stage ...
If anyone wants to read about Washington, this book, rich in detail, meticulous in its research, sensible in its judgments, is the one to read.
Janet Fitch
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewOver the course of more than 800 pages, Fitch conveys the importance of sex for a young woman’s development with Rabelaisian earthiness ... Marina, the reader concludes, is not a true revolutionary; she is tossed like flotsam by great events, and the novel would benefit were she more of a participant ... In publicity materials, Fitch reveals her own lofty aspirations in her declared worship of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment: 'I opened it, and there was my world.' Yet somewhere in the middle of its 800 pages, this novel loses any semblance of her 19th-century forebear’s sense of narrative control. That said, the feral descriptions of sex provide some of the novel’s most amusing, if decidedly un-Dostoyevskian, moments.
Simon Ings
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe heart of the book is the story of the Great Terror that struck the scientific establishment in the 1930s. Ings shows that scientists now depended for resources and promotion (but also for physical survival) on the power of patrons such as top leaders like Andrei Zhdanov, or the greatest patron of all, Stalin. He describes the rise of the maliciously cunning but childlike Trofim Lysenko, who notoriously became Stalin’s favorite scientist ... Ings capably recounts how Soviet science became a laughingstock and often a human tragedy, but he doesn’t explain how Stalinist technology produced colossal successes, too ... Over all, however, Ings is an entertaining storyteller who often captures the essence of things — Stalin was indeed 'the last in a long line of European philosopher kings.' Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today when the Trump administration is challenging the scientific establishment on climate change.
