PositiveBook PostA solid, standard literary biography ... Persistent and lengthy footnotes attest to Richardson’s reluctance to lose any detail. He is a skilled and diligent writer, a ferocious researcher, passionate about his material and highly congenial to the reader ... Becomes more engaging as Matthiessen comes of age and reaches maturity. He wound up leading an extraordinary life ... What to make...of the culture illuminated by Peter Matthiessen’s trek through it? Richardson avoids simple judgments. He offers the reader a complex, flawed human being ... American culture emerges, in the form of Peter Matthiessen, as an unceasing mass of appetites demanding to be fed, often at enormous cost to others.
RaveBook PostShadow Ticket gleefully proves that [Pynchon\'s] intelligence, erudition, energy, wit, and humor have survived intact as he tap dances, cane and all, into his ninth decade. And it reminds us that he has never been sufficiently celebrated for the sheer beauty of his writing ... One of his strengths is his ability to lovingly sketch the world ... It is folly, trying to outline the plot of any Pynchon novel. The drama and meaning reside in the language—sentences gyrating, streaming multiple, tail-chasing clauses ... Uncannily pertinent ... In Shadow Ticket\'s final pages, Pynchon—without losing his lyricism—comes as close as he’s ever dared to sounding didactic ... If you give yourself over to [Pynchon], the novels are tremendously entertaining. Intellectually and emotionally stimulating.
