MixedThe Guardian (UK)A monumental task ... Sobel is unable to tell us much about Curie’s relationships with others in her lab ... I suspect this partly reflects the difficulty of writing about someone so emotionally reserved ... Hasty, breathless treatment.
Jonathan Haidt
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events ... Nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media.
Olivia Laing
MixedNew Statesman (UK)... a beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom, which uses Reich’s ideas to chart the forces that shape and limit bodily freedom today ... Some readers might be glad that Laing finished writing this book before the Covid-19 pandemic was fully under way ... But equally, given the book concerns itself with the relationship between the body, illness and freedom, the connections between our physical and our imaginative lives, it feels bizarre to read no mention of a public health crisis that has completely transfigured our politics...the ways in which it has forced each of us to confront our bodily vulnerability and interdependence. Yet Laing makes only fleeting reference to contemporary events, and this, coupled with her willingness to embrace ambiguity, to leave difficult questions unresolved, can make this book feel politically detached ... For all the boldness and ambition of the subject matter, this book feels curiously tentative. Laing is an elegant, precise writer, and yet her conclusions are vague ... reading Everybody hasn’t helped me see...any more clearly.
Samantha Harvey
RaveNew Statesman (UK)... a disturbing, vivid account. The prose is urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool ... The Shapeless Unease is cubistic, the fragments of text...fit together perfectly to reveal a subject that is there all right, exposed from every angle, but also just beyond reach ... for someone who otherwise possesses such talent for dissecting and assessing her emotions, she seems less self-aware, or perhaps less curious, about her political anger ... The Shapeless Unease is wry and funny as well as angry ... Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not unlike dipping into strange, unchartered waters: it is by turns bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a sense of time having slowed down.
