RaveThe Wall Street JournalA meticulous, thorough and loving selection that constitutes not only a series of reflections and explorations but also a gripping memoir, a Bildungsroman at one remove ... Sacks’s letters are always expressive of his personality, though in various modes ... What makes reading through all of these missives delightful is the inescapable gift for metaphor that sparkles on almost every page.
Isaac Butler
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe theater has its allure, but one often thinks that Irving Berlin’s \'There’s No Business Like Show Business\' could profit from the bracing corrective of Noël Coward’s \'Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage.\' Isaac Butler’s intense, deeply researched, historically alert, well-written, eminently readable (and gossipy) The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act explores the art of acting with sufficient depth and clarity to support both positions ... [a] capacious book, which includes cogent close readings of individual scenes from films as well as stage performances ... Mr. Butler reminds us, in the age of blockbuster movies with knock-’em-dead special effects, one big problem is holding the attention of an audience. Too much mystery, or \'subtext,\' or inwardness, or dialogue, may bore them.
Matthew Aucoin
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... neither dry-as-dust scholarship nor gushing, gossipy opera dish, although it packs plenty of historical knowledge, stylistic analysis and enthusiastic personal details into its pages ... It is, instead, an omnium gatherum of essays on diverse operatic subjects, mostly the relationship of words and music ... Mr. Aucoin knows the score, inside and out ... Matthew Aucoin is a polymath. He is at home in the world, and with the sensibilities, of Claudio Monteverdi and Jacopo Peri, opera’s first composers at the beginning of the 17th century. He is equally comfortable among musical and performance touchstones of the late 20th and 21st, from Tom Waits and Animal Collective to RuPaul and Radiohead ... The autobiographical parts of Mr. Aucoin’s breezily written book will hold a reader’s interest. But this book is more than his story. Its investigations of musical themes and personal obsessions constitute a scholar’s analysis and a practitioner’s diary as well as a lover’s rhapsody. Mr. Aucoin is an amiable and knowledgeable field guide to the territory of the form he calls \'another planet\' ... Mr. Aucoin takes his readers into the very processes, intimate and extended, of collaboration ... People who thought that opera was only for ladies in furs and jewels, or old gentlemen falling asleep during bloated spectacles in foreign languages, have nothing to fear. Those audiences are gone.
Matthew Beaumont
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... an erudite book that moves at a pace alternating between brisk and leisurely ... That knot of emotion and energy is a clue to the book’s approach to its subject, which is not walking as exercise or locomotion, but the more challenging territory of the politics and poetics of walking, primarily in cities, and as recounted in literature of the past two centuries ... Mr. Beaumont’s claim that \'walking became a self-conscious activity in the nineteenth century\' is an exaggeration, but his writers all depict the existential angst created by drifting, vagrancy and getting lost in a modern urban labyrinth ... Like his prose, Mr. Beaumont’s mind is anything but pedestrian, and he moves in unpredictable directions. He is as attuned to matters of medicine and science, anthropology, economics, philosophy and psychology as he is to literature and the visual arts ... Mr. Beaumont uses the language of contemporary literary theory, but with none of the rebarbative jargon-mongering of others in the professoriate. His references to the usual suspects are never gratuitous, but always helpful in understanding the literary, historical, and psychological terrain he explores.
Stephen Harrigan
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a Texas-sized book ... Lavishly illustrated, fully annotated, brimming with sass, intelligence, trenchant analysis, literary acumen and juicy details, it is a page-turner that can be read straight through or at random. It is big. It is popular history at its best .. unfolds a panorama—one damned thing after another, especially of battles and skirmishes for much of its first half—and it does so with gusto, affection and sobriety. Mr. Harrigan has a ready-made cast of characters who prove that truth is stranger than fiction.
Philippe Costamagna, Trans. by Frank Wynne
MixedThe Wall Street JournalThat eye, the subject of Philippe Costamagna’s often exhilarating and informative, sometimes self-indulgent new book, could tell at a glance the real McCoy from a fake ... Mr. Costamagna is catholic in his enthusiasm and is open to the new. He tells delicious stories. Also, to his credit, he admits his mistakes ... On the other hand, he is less impressive as a writer than as an Eye. His book wanders. It repeats itself. He is most interesting when reporting from the field regarding the traditions and styles of connoisseurship, but his prose, translated from the French by the Irish-born polyglot Frank Wynne, is studded with unnecessary adjectives and clichés ... it lacks illustrations. The extensive treatment of paintings, prints and the ways of ascertaining authenticity would profit from more images. Mr. Costamagna’s rambling discussions make the irrefutable point that questions of attribution—regardless of whether the Eye is still considered a major resource for scholars, historians, educators and buyers—continue to engage everyone’s attention.
Lawrence Wright
RaveThe Wall Street Journal\"Mr. Wright is alert to the manifold strengths, eccentricities and idiocies that define his home base. He comes at his topics with both a journalist’s and an anthropologist’s clear-eyed acumen and an insider’s willingness to chuckle and forgive deficiencies ... Mr. Wright is at his best when putting things in perspective. He proudly defends his state to sophisticated liberal friends on either coast whose condescension to most things Texan reflects their total ignorance ... Mr. Wright’s book interlaces political analysis and historical and cultural explorations with touching personal details. It is at once a piece of journalism, a love letter to a place and a memoir.\
Daniel Mendelsohn
RaveThe Wall Street JournalAn Odyssey is, by turns, a family memoir, a brilliant piece of literary criticism, a pedagogue’s diary and an addition to the recent genre of books that show how reading can change your life ... At the conclusion of Homer’s epic, Odysseus restores order in Ithaca; civic and domestic harmony prevail. Mr. Mendelsohn’s book closes on notes of sadness and triumph. We sometimes experience happy endings, in life and art, with both smiles and tears ... But the heart of the book is fathers and sons: sons looking for fathers, doubting them and then understanding them; fathers challenging, and also rooting for, their sons. This is no stereotypical Freudian-Oedipal model of battle and destruction. Affection exists at every turn ... Like Homer, Mr. Mendelsohn makes us grateful for journeys, and the companions—especially our families—who accompany us along our individual and collective paths.
Adam Kirsch
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMany of Mr. Kirsch’s complementary musings are masterly. He is a formalist poet. His meditations and inquiries are quiet, even though war and annihilation underlie his subjects.
