RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewShe skillfully interweaves observations by friends, scholars and literary figures like Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison with grim climate data and social science findings ... While Raboteau grapples with much that is wrong with our troubled world, she does so with bracing honesty and insight. The strength of her book is her willingness to express concerns that many feel but are reluctant to voice.
David Waldstreicher
PositiveAtlanticWheatley emerges in these pages as a literary marvel. Waldstreicher’s comprehensive account is a monument to her prowess ... The greatest achievement of Waldstreicher’s biography is the portrayal of Wheatley as a serious poet ... His painstaking interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement ... But while thorough, the narrative is not immersive in the way of some other historical biographies swimming in setting and character sketches. One never feels as though the texture and verve of 18th-century Boston are fully captured ... Although Waldstreicher spends hundreds of pages meticulously portraying Wheatley in the richness of her context and tracing the intricacies of her intellectual contemporaries and antecedents, he chooses not to do the same for his own predecessors and interlocutors.
Colin Dickey
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe spectral map Dickey creates is as broad and packed as his book’s title implies ... interweaves a series of perceptive insights on architecture and human psychology, technology and ghost hunts, not to mention haunting as social control ... Ghostland amounts to a lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories ... Dickey achieves a capacious geographical synthesis that is both intellectually intriguing and politically instructive.