MixedSan Francisco Chroniclea sweeping and richly detailed account of a play that unquestionably and in multiple ways reconfigured our collective cultural landscape. The book, which labors at times under its own surfeit of material, is especially and movingly good at capturing the ongoing reverberance and currency of Angels. It also conveys, on a granular level, the determination, heartbreak and competitive fire that go into making great theater ... Butler and Kois ... pile on more testimony...than they can usefully deploy. Exclamatory asides from relatively minor figures...come off as stray distractions. Other subjects, like the mechanics of angel wings or various student productions, might have been productively truncated. But when the authors succeed in orchestrating the voices, as they often do, the book takes on a choral authority.
Eileen Myles
MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleIn hopscotching from poetic monologues to intensely rendered memories, ideological pronouncements to a comic dialogue between Rosie and the author’s childhood puppet, Myles has fashioned an eccentric, fitfully engaging and finally vexing work … Afterglow ranges widely and freely through time, geographical space (New York, San Diego, Ireland) and topics. Myles takes up, often fleetingly, gender politics, her father’s alcoholism, the physical and emotional qualities of foam, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the nature of good and evil … In its recollections of connection and loss, Afterglow has more than a few piercing insights. The problem is how frequently they get lost in the fog.
Bronwen Dickey
MixedThe San Francisco ChroniclePit Bull is very good at framing and contextualizing the swirl of fear and aversion these dogs induced. Fashion fads, economic factors, crime statistics, sensationalistic media, irrational scapegoating and even a form of racism play into it ... But the author undermines her cause when she writes around or shades the evidence. While acknowledging 'the serious problem of dog bites in American cities,' she’s quick to blame the media for seizing on pit bulls as the aggressors and downplaying other dogs. The most vivid accounts of dog violence involve other breeds ... Informative, keenly argued and engaging as much of it is, Pit Bull won’t persuade everyone about a breed that first came on the scene as fighting dogs in the late 19th century.
Roger Angell
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleThose less devoted than this reviewer to (a) New Yorker lore and (b) baseball may sniff at some of the morsels or find a higher portion of filler. But the best things are so indisputably fine that patience is richly and repeatedly rewarded.
