RaveThe Guardian (UK)\"What a treat it turns out to be to wander anew the fusty, crumbling warren of the Circus ... The prose of Karla’s Choice is not an absolutely perfect exercise in ventriloquism of the master, nor does it try to be. There may be a few seeming anachronisms...but there is a satisfyingly cold tone throughout, recalling the way that le Carré’s own furiously tamped-down moralism (in the novels of the 1960s and 70s, at least) could approach nihilism ... He demonstrates superbly, too, how suspense can arise from the patient accumulation of detail, and the brilliant climactic scene is nothing so vulgar as an action-movie shootout but rather a sequence of ordinary bureaucratic peril: the attempt to cross a border when one’s papers are not quite in order.\
Yuval Noah Harari
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Nexus...contains many too-brief but fascinating discussions on subjects ... There are a brilliant few pages ... When Harari is not in his mode of oracular pontification, he can be a superb narrative writer. But oracular pontification is what, we must assume, his readers want.
Nate Silver
MixedThe Guardian (UK)In its prolix and flibbertigibbet way, this smart guy’s book now swerves to large gambling-adjacent matters ... The book is an exercise in self-justification, but what it fails to justify is the assumption that mathematics can in some way predict the course of human affairs ... Politics is not, in the end, just a game of cards.
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)Superbly argued ... A fascinating and brilliant critique of the many ways in which thinking about games has been used for nefarious purposes, although it’s somewhat thinner as a celebration – which it also aims to be – of the joy and creativity in play itself.
David Ignatius
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA meaty, slow-burning spy thriller ... Despite a couple of creaking exposition scenes about the basics of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the novel works both as a downbeat, atmospheric thriller and as a serious primer on the vulnerability of modern satellite technologies to cybersubversion and sabotage.
Annie Jacobsen
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)Throughout the book, Jacobsen is rather facetiously sceptical about the idea of deterrence ... In terms of style, Nuclear War appears to have been written for those who find the novels of Dan Brown too sophisticated. Pulp-thrillerish one-sentence paragraphs abound ... But Jacobsen’s book provides a more accessible and deeper compendium of the unsettling facts about nuclear history, planning, and devastation, and her addition of Putin and his henchmen into the mix.
Simon Schama
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)\"[A] splendid and often moving work of history ... Foreign Bodies is also an essay in the history of scientific discovery, with a scholarly determination to avoid superficial eureka moments. And Schama has a gift for combining novelistically colorful detail, serious analysis, and wryly amusing asides.\
Andy Clark
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Clark... offers some ideas on how consciousness itself arises, suggesting that a kind of recursion – in which a system is constantly predicting things about its own predictions, as well as about the outside world – could be key. This will satisfy some readers more than others, and it’s notable that his descriptions of how our minds work tend to ascribe agency to the brain itself. But a brain doesn’t have agency; a person does ... It’s difficult to believe, meanwhile, that prediction is, deep down, all brains or people do.
Peter Frankopan
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Rich and fascinating ... This is one of those books that aims to tell the whole story of everything from a cute new angle, so inevitably there are longueurs where the focus on climate is temporarily forgotten and a few pages of potted history or comparative religion take over ... There are hints that Frankopan might belong to the more misanthropic end of the green spectrum. He disapproves of cities, which indeed consume many resources and emit much waste, even though living in a city is more energy-efficient than not ... The Earth Transformed ends in a vision not so much pessimistic as quasi-apocalyptic.
Jonathan Kennedy
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Fascinating ... The book thus performs that satisfying trick of encouraging the reader to think differently about familiar topics, though its ideas are inevitably variable in their persuasiveness ... The author seems to approve considerably more of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, celebrating the undoubted improvement in living standards of many millions of people in China over the last few decades. He is also curiously happy to accept the official Chinese figures on Covid death rates in order to argue that the US and \'liberal democracy\' in general are not obviously superior systems ... Kennedy is convincing, though.
Henry Marsh
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)\"...[a] beautifully written, autumnal memoir ... More philosophically, Marsh also muses on broader topics such as the nature of sleep, ageing and consciousness. He produces marvellous facts...while emphasising how little is known about how our grey matter actually works ... One couldn’t wish for a better guide around the ruins, even if it seems to the author that many other things are also crumbling around him, and not only the ones he built himself.\
Adam Rutherford
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Fizzy and pugnacious little book ... Rutherford’s account of this history is superbly horrific ... Where this book really shines, though, is in its fierce (and often very funny) demonstration of how this kind of thing is for the moment just a pipe dream, philosophical or otherwise ... The last third of the book is a brilliant primer.
Hana Videen
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)As it races through colourful examples, the book does also occasionally pause to make an interesting scholarly argument ... As the author invites us to see it, though, her book is in general more like \'an old photo album\'” than a language primer ... What is most striking to the modern reader, perhaps, is what strong pleasure the Anglo-Saxons evidently took in smashing words together to form compounds: devil-sickness, slaughter-mist, war-sweat...In which case, it’s a pleasure just to be reminded of their world-craft.
Oliver Roeder
PositiveWall Street JournalThe subtitle of Mr. Roeder’s book—\'A Human History\'—has a whiff of end-resigned melancholy, implicitly contrasting with a computer-dominated future. In point of fact, Mr. Roeder doesn’t concentrate much on the purely human history of his seven games ... The focus of Seven Games is, instead, on more recent history and the application of so-called \'artificial intelligence\' to games, as well as its influence on their competitive cultures. Here is where the book’s rich human interest—and comedy—really lie ... In pleasingly gonzo style, the author enters the North American Scrabble Championship as well as the World Series of Poker, drawing delightful pen-portraits of his adversaries while entertainingly evoking his own emotional roller-coaster ... Such gems of human prose style, not yet imitable by AI, are implicitly set against the worry—expressed throughout—that computer amanuenses are everywhere sucking the fun out of things ... But games, in the meantime, make us happy because they need no \'why\' at all. The best furnish an arena for learning, the pleasurable exercise of skill and a cathartic burst of consequence-free conflict.
Hervé Le Tellier, Tr. Adriana Hunter
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Each chapter of the book’s first section introduces a different cast member, mainly French or American, in a different novelistic or televisual style (deftly handled in Adriana Hunter’s clever translation) ... Other tableaux are by turns amusing and affecting ... It has been a bravura 100 pages of introductions and emotional or comedic complications before the conceptual inciting event happens ... After a suitably ludic ending, we are left with an after-echo, a feat of fiction informed by other fictions. Le Tellier describes a world flattened by the unbearable lightness of representation ... it seems fitting that the novel’s screen adaptation rights have already been sold.
Tom McCarthy
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Do not...mistake this for a spy thriller. It proceeds not primarily by events, but by the accretion and rhyming of concepts ... a novel is a contraption too, which is why we have no reason to expect minor characters to do any more than function, like this one, as Professor Exposition ... Observing people caught on CCTV, one character thinks they \'move strangely: at normal speed, but with a motion that’s somehow imprecise and fluid at the same time, as though they were immersed in water\'—a beautiful observation, and one that also applies to the people in the novel. But that is thematic, this being also a novel of cybernetics, which considers its humans as parts of a larger feedback machine ... Some chapters trace a single spiralling thought to a satisfying image of negative epiphany ... It’s only when the writing attempts to stretch beyond its enjoyably ironic style of deadpan cataloguing that it falters, with italics straining to signal importance, or words piled up to grasp at an idea that doesn’t materialise. The overall effect of The Making of Incarnation, then, is like that of an extremely dense art installation—or indeed a machine, within which the reader, too, can play only the designed function. It is implacable and intermittently tedious, but then isn’t the world, too?
Laura Bates
RaveThe Guardian (UK)For this brilliantly fierce and eye-opening book, Bates has descended into the vast underworld sewage system of online misogyny, and brought back a persuasive and alarming thesis. But first she guides the reader through the various hellish circles of what she terms the \'manosphere\' ... It is tempting to dismiss the sites of the manosphere as mere sad little cesspools, but what Bates’s patient, thorough approach reveals is much worse. They are a breeding ground for what she rightly calls the \'radicalisation\' of young men online ... As Bates shows, moreover, sexism and anti-immigrant rhetoric often go hand in hand, via the conspiracy theory that foreigners challenge the rightful supremacy of the white male ... Bates agrees that the phrase is problematic, but, as she wryly asks towards the end of her book, why should she and her sisters have to do all the work of detoxifying language, and men themselves? Perhaps we men who don’t hate women can make a small start by replacing talk of \'toxic masculinity\' with something more appropriate to Johnson, Trump, and their acolytes – perhaps, say, \'pathetic man-babyism\'?
Kim Stanley Robinson
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Within these pages there is much hard science, of atmospheric and oceanic physics, usually helpfully explained by a passing expert; but also speculative military strategy, plenty of economic history and much comforting detail about the grey civility of Switzerland in winter ... Robinson shows that an ambitious systems novel about global heating must in fact be an ambitious systems novel about modern civilisation too, because everything is so interdependent. Luckily, when he opens one of his discursive interludes with the claim \'Taxes are interesting\', he makes good on it within two pages. There is no shortage of sardonic humour here, a cosmopolitan range of sympathies, and a steely, visionary optimism ... Dark comic relief comes from fragmentary dialogues between unnamed speakers.
James Danckert
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)This is one of those occasions, not so rare as generally imagined, when the philosophers did, after all, get it right the first time, before the scientists came along to see what was what. That conclusion is richly endorsed by this highly interesting and suggestive book on the analysis of boredom from a strictly psychological perspective.
Rutger Bregman
PanThe Guardian (UK)Like most big-idea books, this one begins by absurdly overstating the novelty of its argument ... a polemic in the high Gladwellian style and so aims to be a simple lesson overturning our allegedly preconceived ideas, with the help of carefully selected study citations and pseudo-novelistic scenes from the blitz and other teachable stories ... Such anecdotes are heartwarming, but perhaps you want more evolutionary meat ... inconsistencies bedevil the book, particularly in its argument (again following Rousseau) that the great tragedy of human history was the invention of agriculture and cities around 10,000 years ago ... here, unless he owns a time machine, he is simply making things up. And cherry-picking his evidence again ... At length, Bregman’s wilfully Edenic view of prehistoric society prompts the reader to wonder why, if he loves the hunter-gatherer lifestyle so much, he doesn’t go and live there ... plainly the attempt to replace a story about humans’ essential wickedness with a contrasting story about humans’ essential loveliness has already run aground – as it was bound to, since any claim that complex human beings are essentially one single thing or another is a fairytale.
George Zaidan
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a highly entertaining and deceptively sophisticated book ... In a slyly brilliant bait and switch, what is framed as a book about what we should eat becomes a thriller about the scientific method itself ... The kicker to Mr. Zaidan’s witty and clever analysis is that, even if we assume that the nutritional studies are totally right, their worst-case scenarios are still not that bad.
Lydia Pyne
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... a very fruitful concept ... The best chapters in Ms. Pyne’s book marry fine scientific explanation with cultural history and surprising twists ... Some of her own examples, however, are less convincing than others ... It might have been more apposite to discuss the rich literary history of pseudonymity.
Cixin Liu, Trans. by Joel Martinsen
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Admirers of [The Three-Body Problem] will find something rather different in The Supernova Era, which Liu actually wrote in 2003, before the first Chinese edition of The Three-Body Problem in 2007. Though it is adorned with the colourful nebulae of space-opera art, it is primarily a work of speculative sociology ... It’s no accident that one character mentions William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but Liu’s patient working out of the thought experiment is weirder and wilder. His children are mostly immature and silly, but also imaginative and utterly brutal ... The author, in an afterword, invites us to read it allegorically: first, as a fable about how the younger generation now are growing up in a world frankly incomprehensible to their elders; and secondly, as a description of the state of humanity itself, alone and infantile in the universe, with no user manual to guide us. It’s a credit to the power of his imagination that such interpretations do not overpower the vivid and sometimes horrifying imagery of the story.
John Le Carre
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)His new novel contains several delicious set pieces...and each time one gets going there is the sense of a master enjoying himself hugely: the characters themselves seem to become cleverer and wittier as their puppeteer’s dialogic invention takes flight. It can sometimes seem, indeed, as though the rest of the book comprises merely the stuff that has to be efficiently moved into place, just so, in order that these charged conversations become possible ... it is...laced with fury at the senseless vandalism of Brexit and of Trump, and the way the one is driving Britain into the clammy embrace of the other. Cunningly, though, le Carré wrong-foots the reader to a degree by making the character who is a mouthpiece for this criticism a rather annoying, monomaniacal, friendless geek ... At 288 pages, Agent Running in the Field is a miniature compared with le Carré’s great cold war novels, and it lacks the ruthless clockwork precision of, say, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But it is a very classy entertainment about political ideals and deception. There is a terrific scene set in a park, in particular, in which we gradually realize that all the bystanders are part of a huge team of \'watchers\' marshalled by the spies to observe a secret conversation. The author leaves the reader to draw the disturbing inference that this—in the age of ambient corporate and state surveillance by ubiquitous technology—is simply the way we all live now.
Malcolm Gladwell
PanThe Guardian (UK)Gladwell[\'s] job is to be puzzled by banalities and then replace them, after a great pseudo-intellectual circumambulation, with banalities. Gladwell affects to find it baffling how we can get people we don’t know so wrong. So he calls it \'the stranger problem\', and pretends that it explains everything ... To be sure, this book is not exclusively about standing up for the unlucky men who accidentally do bad things just because the \'stranger problem\' is so lamentably intractable. It is also littered with historical and pop-cultural anecdotes ... Gladwell bases his book on a single notion called \'truth-default theory\'. We tend to assume that other people are telling the truth, which is the basis of trust and social cooperation, so liars are hard to spot. Not mentioned here is the well-known opposite phenomenon: that, far from defaulting to truth, we believe only the information that fits with our preconceived biases. Both ideas are right, because the world is complicated, but Gladwell’s job is to make it seem simple.
Ben Mezrich
PositiveThe GuardianSo far that doesn’t seem like much of a story – wealthy speculators speculate and accumulate – but what Mezrich does with it is more interesting than that. It ends up being a kind of anthropology of the bitcoin craze ... The book is written with a slick beauty. It is structured as a sequence of dramatic scenes ... The book even has a truly heartwarming ending, at which the reader gives a little cheer. As an introduction to the rise of cryptocurrencies and the modern tech world generally, it is as painless and novelistic as could be imagined.
Laurence Scott
MixedNew StatesmanWith its references to TV and film as well as Lacan and Barthes, the voice is rather like that of a domesticated, smoothed-over Slavoj Žižek ... Not everyone will enjoy its style. There are tics here of an academy-tuned prose that self-importantly announces its concerns...introduces subjects by way of obviously false dichotomies...and faux-hesitantly employs modal verbs to proffer very obvious ideas ... Scott predicts a future that he seems to be unaware already exists ... Some of his subjects seem already analyzed to exhaustion by others, even as they have not actually attained reality yet ... One has the feeling that the author has not long been immersed in these topics, a suspicion unallayed by the apparently slender research on display ... And Scott echoes the glib nonsense of the worst pop-science writers ... On the other hand there is throughout the book a sincere wish to make beautiful sentences and surprising images out of quotidian experience, which can often pay off ... The book lights up, indeed, whenever Scott veers off the beaten track of familiar snark about social media or Fitbit users and the like ... Where the book is most interesting is as a literary close reading of modern culture, and its best chapter swaggeringly demonstrates that everyone is now, perforce, a literary critic ... The general smartphone-using population, the author details brilliantly, is getting a crash course of immersive training in textual ambiguity, the critique of bad metaphors, and the operations of bathos and metonymy.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett
PanThe Guardian\"In many ways the conversation already seems dated in its political preoccupations ... The Horsemen agree eagerly that they are all very brave ... New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed ... This is where the preeningly fearless insistence on entertaining uncomfortable questions can so easily lead ... In its messianic conviction that it alone serves the cause of truth, this too is a faith as noxious as any other.\
James Griffiths
RaveThe Guardian... excellent ... The detailed historical picture that he draws of the Chinese authorities’ approach to the online world over the last three decades is nonetheless fascinating and eye-opening ... As a China specialist, he travels to Beijing, Hong Kong and elsewhere to interview brave individuals, and draws a compellingly atmospheric picture of modern arguments about control and self-determination, and even the dangerous politics of drop-down menus in web-forms ... This is an exciting and sobering account of how freedom, which was never in the internet code in the first place, can be effectively curtailed with the tools that were supposed to liberate us.
Douglas Rushkoff
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThe book, indeed, rarely pauses to consider pesky counterexamples to...grand claims. It is a manifesto-style sequence of 100 numbered sections, flitting from one subject to another. Mr. Rushkoff is on firmest ground when discussing his central theme: that, of all Earth’s animals, humans are especially good at \'working and playing together,\' and it is only the virtue of social cooperation that might lead us out of the current mess. But how, exactly? ... The concrete suggestions here...are rather thin ... Mr. Rushkoff does have a gift for the counterintuitive aphorism, which occasionally sparkles through the clouds ... The book’s structure enables him to wander off on some curious tangents. He gives a thoroughly garbled account of the difference between vinyl and digital music formats that seems to rest on a series of technical misunderstandings ... The casual, riffing style also skates past a lot of complications in its invocation of a magical pre-internet golden age ... The book is at its best when inferring a social diagnosis from a small, telling detail ... Overall, Team Human paints our current predicament with infectious élan and energy ... The book’s own style of fractured attention and shallow detail, however, can often seem as much a symptom of this problem as a solution to it.
Benjamin Dreyer
MixedThe GuardianDreyer promises to reveal \'some of the fancy little tricks I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better\', and does so with accuracy, style, and a humour that is slightly relentless ... Here we go again with the old spectre of logocentrism – the belief that speech is more authentic than writing. Prose that can easily be read aloud on the first try is the kind of frictionless, conversational writing that makes no demands on the reader, which is fine for certain applications and depressingly unambitious for others ... On grammar, Dreyer has clearly expressed opinions, even if they run against the modern grain ... It is a shame, at least, to see him take a mansplaining swipe at Alanis Morissette and her song \'Ironic\' by claiming \'Rain on your wedding day is not irony\' ... The book peters out in the kinds of padding common to this genre: advice on what to do with numbers and foreign phrases, how to spell the names of celebrities, and that mysterious old standby, the list of commonly confused words ... Much as you might disagree with some of Dreyer’s preferences, you can’t help warming to a writer who has become this attuned to nuances of meaning, and even spelling.
Geoff Dyer
MixedThe GuardianA curious literary artefact ... It’s all highly entertaining, and a fine excuse to watch the movie again, even if it could have used a bit more research ... Dyer can’t help writing brilliant sentences even if he is not always trying very hard.
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson
MixedThe GuardianMuch of the heavy lifting of analysis and argument has already been done in the previous book [The Spirit Level], and this one contains more opinion, speculation and arguable interpretation of evidence, as the authors wander off briefly into different fields of inquiry ... For all the power of the book’s data and charts the reader may remain unconvinced that inequality explains everything bad, and greater equality explains everything good, about happiness levels in different countries ... But, the authors argue, capitalism also needs to be overthrown because climate change demands a social revolution ... this nice rhetoric is a bit woolly, and short on persuasive details of how a zero-carbon, zero-growth nirvana may be achieved.
Torill Kornfeldt, Trans. by Fiona Graham
PositiveThe GuardianAdvances in gene-editing technology promise to make \'de‑extinction\' a potentially viable enterprise, but what exactly is the point? To answer this question, the Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt has travelled to meet the researchers involved for this excellent book, written with a deceptively light touch (in Fiona Graham’s translation), that raises a number of deep questions and paradoxes about our relationship with nature ... There are no right or wrong answers in this area, but as Kornfeldt implies, the rhetoric of such debates still revolves around a few presumptive virtues that are rarely interrogated deeply.
Nick Chater
RaveThe GuardianYou probably think you have beliefs, desires, fears, a personality, an \'inner life\', maybe even a subconscious. Poppycock, says Nick Chater, a behavioural psychologist. All that stuff is folk nonsense...The book could equally have been called The Mind Is Shallow, though potential readers might have found that more off-puttingly rude ... This is one of those books that is a superb exposition of scientific findings, from which the author proceeds to draw highly polemical and speculative inferences. There are beautiful discussions of how little we actually see around us: eye-tracking software can show us a page filled with Xs with one word positioned exactly where we are looking , and we have the experience of seeing a full page of text.
Richard K Morgan
PositiveThe Guardian[A] super-fluid action thriller ... a dazzlingly intricate game of political double- and triple-cross, spiced with tastily kinetic battle sequences ... Luckily most of the action happens outside the bedroom, and it’s expertly written. Morgan is very good at the mild, pleasurable alienation of unexplained but workable-out vocabulary items ... Most of all, Tak Veil’s first-person narration is addictive and deceptively highly wrought: it’s casual and coarse, as befits a former mercenary, yet highly imagistic and sensuously attuned ... By the end, rather unkindly, you hope he gets sucked back into it in a sequel.
Anthony Horowitz
PositiveThe GuardianHorowitz has...come up with an excellent villain: a tremendously corpulent Corsican drug-dealer named Scipio ... Horowitz is good at action scenes, which he helps along with emotive adjectives ... Inevitably, the prose throughout is more verbose and cliched than the brutal efficiencies of Fleming, but Forever and a Day is still an enjoyably compact thriller, with an absolutely killer last line. Scattered throughout the book, too, are some pleasingly echt Bond moments, as when he tells one of his captors: \'It would be nice to know your name when I kill you.\'
Eric Vuillard, Trans. by, Mark Polizzotti
RaveThe Guardian\"In this obsidian gemstone of a book, the novelist and film-maker Éric Vuillard uses such details—moments of farce, historical flotsam—to conduct a powerful argument against the inevitability of history ... In Mark Polizzotti’s translation, the prose has an aphoristic gleam ... And [Vuillard] is brilliant on the authoritarian’s relationship to the law, when describing how Hitler insisted that the Austrian president must accept his chancellor’s resignation ... However you decide to categorize it, this is a thoroughly gripping and mesmerizing work of black comedy and political disaster.\
John Kaag
MixedThe GuardianIt is surprising to see a professional philosopher talking of \'mere abstraction\' here. Few people today will stand up for abstraction, but it is a keystone of all intellectual endeavour, as Nietzsche himself well knew ... Kaag has a pleasingly wry, compact style, and is particularly interesting on thinkers that Nietzsche influenced heavily: Herman Hesse and Theodor Adorno ... Nietzsche’s demand is that you should joyfully embrace such a prospect; indeed, to do so he calls the \'highest formula of affirmation\'. Kaag rather spoils the moment here by reducing this awful existential task to a version of the old metaphysical idea \'that the movement of reality is best described in terms of cycles and epicycles\'. But Nietzsche wasn’t making positive claims about the nature of material reality, he was throwing down a gauntlet; and we have still not picked it up.
Jonathan Lethem
PanThe Guardian... propelled more by the arch brevity of its chapters than by any real suspense ... Lethem, a virtuoso stylist and brilliant scene-setter, here deals mainly in cliches ... Lethem said he felt he should be an \'honest witness, recording my own reactions\' to the coming of President Trump. This he certainly seems to have done, but he has not quite escaped the obvious danger: that in doing so, the writer will turn fiction into a kind of febrile opinion piece. Transformed by the desert, Phoebe eventually finds she no longer empathises with the Angelenos who treat it as a theme park, \'conceptual artists and all-terrain-vehicle buffs and suburban preppers\' – not to mention Brooklyn novelists who use it as a stage for their own therapeutic diaries.
Yuval Noah Harari
PanThe Wall Street JournalWe should, he recommends, \'switch from panic mode to bewilderment.\' Try telling yourself, he encourages the reader, \'I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.\' The author, by contrast, writes as if he understands absolutely everything about what’s going on in the world but needn’t stoop to details. Many of the book’s chapters have their genesis in occasional pieces of journalism, and much of the text is windy punditry. There are many generalizing statements next to which this skeptical reader penciled, in the jargon of Wikipedia, \'citation needed\' ... Mr. Harari’s idea of technology is similarly more concerned with broad sweep than fact and plausibility ... This book is marketed as history and promises to guide us through the present and near future, and yet by the conclusion its overriding tone is rather mystically navel-gazing.
Errol Morris
PanThe GuardianThis book is his long-brewed revenge ... There’s a really big problem with Morris’s account, and it’s right there in his book’s subtitle: Kuhn did not, in fact, \'deny reality.\' He simply insisted that we could ultimately never know the fundamental truth about reality ... this book’s central and rather hysterically repeated accusation, that Kuhn thought reality didn’t exist and science was merely a social power game, is just plain wrong ... [Morris is] going on a flamethrower rampage from the start in an attempt to reduce everything to smouldering ash.
Bill Clinton & James Patterson
MixedThe Guardian\"Patterson, who never knowingly writes a paragraph when a single sentence will do, also seems highly unlikely to have authored all the prose-blocks of sorrowful asides on the state of the media and politics today ... Throughout, the story regularly halts for folksy homilies on police shootings of African Americans (bad), stricter gun control (good), or the desirability of friendly relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia. But never mind, because soon we will cut to a sexy vegetarian assassin dangling from a tree, or a silent helicopter making stuff blow up, or Secret Service men clenching their jaws in moodily lit rooms as their maverick president plans to do something they don’t like. As long as it concentrates on this stuff, the forthcoming Showtime TV series will no doubt be a hit.\
Michio Kaku
MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"With admirable clarity and ease, Mr. Kaku rehearses the history of rocketry and the formation of the planets, and explains how we might colonize not only Mars but some of the rocky moons of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn ...The book has an infectious, can-do enthusiasm and is occasionally even a little silly. But since the author covers so much ground—appropriately enough for a book about traveling the universe—no subject can be treated in great depth ... What, meanwhile, does a highly speculative work of popular science such as this one do that a well-researched work of science fiction doesn’t? Mr. Kaku understands SF’s attractions—he introduces chapter topics by mentioning movies (such as Interstellar) or novels (such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series). But a lot of modern science fiction is richer than Mr. Kaku’s treatments of his subjects in technical detail as well as in emotional heft.\
Jim Holt
RaveThe Wall Street JournalSome chapters are elegant profiles of scientists and mathematicians ... Some pieces limn the history of a certain idea ... Other chapters are long book reviews, as when Mr. Holt...gently savages (\'a book that prizes difficulty but not rigor\') a book...by David Foster Wallace. Another book he describes as \'full of the sort of excess detail that mathematicians call ‘hair.\'\' In this sense it is a pleasure to report that, aside from a few inevitable repetitions between essays, Mr. Holt’s book is perfectly bald.
Will Storr
PositiveThe Guardian\"Will Storr’s thoughtful and engaging book comes at the idea of the human self’s relationship with itself from many angles ... Storr is sympathetic...but it’s worth pointing out that the suggestion that an entire new generation of young people is selfish in unprecedented ways is the kind of thing that the grumpy middle-aged have been saying since time immemorial. And recently, quite a few of the young seem to have found time away from selfie-taking to vote for decidedly anti-neoliberal policies. So, although Storr’s cultural history is fascinating and often persuasive, his diagnosis of where we are now might well be too pessimistic.\
Jo Nesbø, Trans. by Don Bartlett
PositiveThe GuardianNesbø orchestrates scenes of blackmail and fighting with the slickness of a writer who has sold 36m crime novels. There are odd touches of the supernatural, sometimes with a naturalistic alternative explanation. (The ghost of the murdered Banquo turns up at a dinner, but Macbeth might just be hallucinating because he’s high.) Nesbø finds some clever twists, too ... At times the novel strains credulity ... The book’s style, in Don Bartlett’s translation from the Norwegian, is workmanlike ... This is in the end a deliciously oppressive page-turner that, like The Tragedy of Macbeth itself, seems to harbour something ineradicably evil at its core.
Nick Harkaway
MixedThe Guardian\"A novel can be awfully long without being long-winded. Gnomon, however, reads like the first draft of what might have been a tighter 400-page book rather than a rambling 700-pager. Progress is routinely halted by sketchy Wikipedia-style exposition-dumps about tidal flow or behavioural economics, or a character asking herself a whole page or two of questions about what just happened, or vague disquisitions on the meaning of identity. Things are repeatedly explained, unnecessarily ... the novel wants very much to be propelled by dramatic tension and a sense of jeopardy, but there can’t really be any when a plot proceeds as this one does, essentially from one deus ex machina to the next. Pretty much anything can happen, so you can’t make educated guesses about what might occur next ... Of all the characters, though, the most interesting is actually the least human, and the one after whom the novel is named...He is angry and funny, and a really interesting effort at portraying a consciousness that at some level is irreducibly alien. As the novel itself rather too insistently hopes, it is Gnomon’s voice you remember most clearly after the end.\
Ali Smith
PositiveThe GuardianEveryone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? Essentially this is a modern-day reworking of Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem, in which unexpected dinner guest Terence Stamp charismatically destroys a bourgeois family. Here, too, the lives of Eve, Michael, Magnus and Astrid will never be the same after Amber's visitation … The Accidental has an infectious sense of fun and invention. The story goes through some surprising reversals and arrives at a satisfying conclusion, which is also a beginning.
Robert M. Sapolsky
PositiveThe GuardianSapolsky goes back through adolescence, childhood and gestation (including genetics), and, beyond the birth of the individual, to more distant causes still – those found in culture, evolutionary psychology, game theory and comparative zoology. He makes the book consistently entertaining, with an infectious excitement at the puzzles he explains, and wry dude-ish asides ... This book is a miraculous synthesis of scholarly domains, and at the same time laudably careful in its determination to point out at every step the limits of our knowledge ... But Sapolsky’s insistence on the truth of strict determinism poses wider problems for the way he frames the rest of his book ... It remains debatable, though, whether strict determinism is compatible with Sapolsky’s final message of hope for humanity.
Mark Z. Danielewski
PositiveThe GuardianThere is something very wrong. The Navidson Record becomes a vérité horror film as Will and his friends try to explore the anomalous space, which rearranges itself periodically with a roar, and expands into terrifying volumes of darkness … Danielewski...weaves around his brutally efficient and genuinely chilling story a delightful and often very funny satire of academic criticism. In one way, and after the manner of Moby-Dick, the novel is its own Leviathan commentary … House of Leaves...is a superbly inventive creation. It is not mere genre fiction, because the author so gleefully ignores the conventions of horror: no finally unmasked monster, no ghosts, no malign extraterrestrials. There is only the house.
Francis Spufford
RaveThe Guardian...[a] splendidly entertaining and ingenious first novel ... The third-person narrative voice, in era-appropriate style, is the book’s great comic triumph ... Throughout Golden Hill, Spufford creates vivid, painterly scenes of street and salon life, yet one never feels as though a historical detail has been inserted just because he knew about it. Here is deep research worn refreshingly lightly ... The whole thing, then, is a first-class period entertainment, until at length it becomes something more serious. The comedy gives way to darker tones, and Smith’s secret is at last revealed – but the novel, most pleasingly, still has one more trick up its sleeve.
Zachary Mason
MixedThe Guardian...an enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage ... Void Star’s particular tricksiness lies in its not revealing when some apparently physical location might be a virtual hallucination — and even when some apparently real characters are just memory reconstructions running on computers, unbeknown to themselves or the reader. This is clever, but sometimes feels cheap: a character will die dramatically, only for it to turn out that it was just a copy ... But Void Star’s larger drawback is that, as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract.
Mathias Enard, Trans. by Charlotte Mandell
PositiveThe Guardian\"As a literary genre, the stream-of-consciousness epic is by now rather old and conservative, even though new versions are regularly hailed as daringly experimental. Compass, in its relentlessly discursive impressiveness, embodies an uncompromising vision of the novel as relatively static political and cultural essay – at least until the final few pages, when, miraculously, real-time events intrude upon Franz’s reverie, and the book concludes with a surprisingly upbeat, if not sentimental, flourish. As the dawn does for our sleepless hero, this comes as a relief to the reader, who emerges from this strangely powerful work as from a feverish dream.\
Derek Thompson
PositiveThe GuardianThe book’s best and most original contribution is a chapter that patiently demolishes the idea that cultural products ever actually 'go viral.' The disease model, in which people infect other people who in turn infect others, simply doesn’t explain massive hits ... he has conducted a lot of interviews and read some original research. Yet occasionally he does seem to hang a lot on a single, rather obscure study that may not warrant such confident extrapolations, and he sometimes slips himself into the zombie semantics of marketing speak ... So is Hit Makers a hit in the making? Well, one of the key things the author wants us to understand throughout is this: 'Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic – curious to discover new things – and deeply neophobic – afraid of anything that’s too new.' Or, to put it less pseudo-scientifically, people want something that’s a bit new but also deeply familiar. It is surely no coincidence that Hit Makers, a book of a very familiar type with a couple of good new twists, is the ideal kind of product for such an audience.
Steven Johnson
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Johnson’s narrative is crammed with elegantly told vignettes from the history of ideas...But what do all these subjects have in common? By the end, Mr. Johnson is invoking the brain’s dopamine system in a neural pseudo-explanation; his conclusions seemingly reduce the idea of play to a simple desire for novelty, driven by something he calls 'the surprise instinct' ... But much of the book’s material seems to be thrown in merely because it is interesting (which it is), and the ambition to link it all under the conceptual umbrella of 'play' doesn’t work.
Ian Bogost
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThis is one of those books that overuses the first-person plural, constantly claiming that 'we' fear this or that, or that 'we' have this or that wrong-headed idea, or that 'we are also miserable and bored.' Play Anything is nonetheless an erudite and often amusing book, not so much an extended argument as a series of variations on a theme, with a wide range of reference ... Less successful are the book’s aspirations to being a self-help manual ... Where the book functions best as a critique of modern culture is in its insistence that we moderns are too self-obsessed and inward-looking.
James Gleick
MixedThe GuardianCuriously, Gleick does not go into much detail about the scientific work on time travel of the last few decades, because he is convinced that physicists working on the subject have just read too much science fiction (they have, he condescendingly writes, been 'unwittingly conditioned' by it), and are wasting their own and everyone else’s, um, time ... What, then, is Gleick’s cultural diagnosis? He argues that the persistent dream of time travel is a cultural fantasy of escaping the worries of the present, and in particular of eluding death. This is perceptive and no doubt true, but it would still be true even if time travel were in fact theoretically possible. The author, however, seems too impatient to keep an open mind on the matter ... Time Travel is written with his usual elegance, but there is something morose about it, as though, having embarked on the work, he now can’t believe he is obliged to put all these supposedly clever people right about their stupid fantasies. Indeed, one ends the book intrigued mostly by the quirk of authorial psychology by which someone would choose to write a history of an idea that he is convinced is not only impossible but ridiculous.
Mark Thompson
RaveThe Guardian...[a] superb book ... Thompson’s own experience in the media is brilliantly deployed throughout for insight. Few other commentators on the subject can call on such depth of personally informed analysis ... Thompson is a sharp and entertaining analyst of political language itself, drawing on terms from classical rhetoric.
Tom Wolfe
PanThe GuardianWolfe tells these stories with the kind of free-wheeling vim familiar from his brilliant books such as The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Particularly in the way he ventriloquises the thoughts and worries of his protagonists, the book is superbly written, when it doesn’t tip over into a kind of self-parodic babble. The only problem with Wolfe’s tales, really, is that they are irresponsibly partial accounts, riddled with elementary falsehoods...The Kingdom of Speech, then, is a sad example of the interface of literary celebrity with publishing. An author less famous and bankable than Wolfe would surely have been saved from such embarrassment by more critical editorial attention.
Roger Scruton
PanThe GuardianJust like his communist-minded opponents, then, Scruton seems to think exclusively in terms of an embattled 'us' versus a homogenous 'them.' The overall effect is quite gloomy. Sadly not countenanced within these pages is the possibility that a person might not care for Lacan or Deleuze but still admire Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Žižek — and, for that matter, Scruton.
Gaston Dorren
PositiveThe GuardianHis tour of the continent is a richly diverting exercise, organised into sections on languages and their families, history, politics, writing, vocabulary, grammar and state of endangeredness. He has something interesting to point out about nearly every topic...and delivers a brilliant lesson in how to decipher Cyrillic.
Iain Pears
MixedThe GuardianThe pages of Arcadia flip by easily, and there is fun in trying to guess exactly how its different worlds are related. Yet the novel overall has a curious feeling of weightlessness: ideas are thrown together without much compelling detail or texture.
Diane Williams
PositiveThe Guardian[Everything is] evoked in miniature, with tremendous economy. So the reader is going to have to work out her own line readings. Williams has often been called an 'avant garde' writer, but that doesn’t mean these stories are hard to read or unentertaining. What she is brilliant at, though, is making ordinary language seem newly strange ... Williams’s exquisitely deadpan method can result in a story that evidently means something devastating but is so obliquely sketched that the moral is left tantalisingly out of reach. Or it can produce something that just seems hermetic and odd.
Kenzaburo Oe, Trans. by Deborah Boehm
PositiveThe GuardianOne hopes this is all deliberate, and, at length, so it turns out: Oe wants the reader to get lost, too, in a forest of stories and competing memories... At length what seemed oppressively solipsistic widens out, almost imperceptibly, into a book that is also about politics, war and the place of women in modern Japanese society.
