... fabulously quirky and unconventional ... While the topics are adventurous, the nonfiction collection tackles the all-too-human topic of yearning and its oft-corollary, obsession. Both gurgle beneath the writer’s sonorous and captivating prose ... Her last section, the Dwelling, chimes best.

... surprisingly tentative, full of maybes and perhapses ... Jamison’s chronic uncertainty is a sort of thematic glue ... Are her discomfort and scepticism ethical necessities or evidence of an empathy deficit? Her obsession with, and continual vacillation on, this question are the section’s most salient through line ... Whether Jamison is writing about her own work or that of other artists, she tends to frame her ethical queries in terms of their implications for her and others like her ... Such struggles can be fruitful, and they are not uninteresting, but after several essays in a row they begin to feel obtrusive. Jamison’s intense focus on her own attempts at empathy and understanding often obscures their intended targets. The final section, full of explicitly personal essays, therefore comes as a relief: her best ones move in a widening direction.

Jamison’s essays are united by her insistence that we mustn’t read her as the last word on anything. Should the people she interviews trust her? Should she trust them? Will her attempts to describe subjects be their undoing? These central questions make Jamison’s 14 provocative essays scream and burn ... [Jamison] is compassionate, curious and humble ... Jamison’s self-criticism welcomes us into her book. I can see how it could be irritating, in the way that the half of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that was about whether Dave Eggers should even be writing the book was irritating. But, in Jamison’s hands, the second-guessing never feels dithery or masturbatory. When she questions her judgment or expresses skepticism about a source, it’s not because she’s unsure if she should be telling these stories. It’s because she’s hellbent on getting them right.

Stylistically, the book is almost frustratingly eloquent. Jamison can pin an idea with the speed and fluidity of a pro athlete. She thinks ethically but feels aesthetically. Her writing, although lyrical, proceeds with a precise, searching sobriety—each sentence a controlled swoon ... A question raised by these new essays is whether they advance the work done by The Empathy Exams, ... she avoids interrogating her empathic impulse, even as her skeptical setup feints in that direction. There is nothing wrong with Jamison’s thesis: reaching and imagining are, in fact, good. But she can seem, at times, to be throwing complexity in her own way merely to exercise her thoughtfulness. The resulting essays adopt uncertainty almost as style rather than as subject. Reasoning by metaphor allows Jamison to please everyone ... Jamison cares that we care about the whale. But what does she believe? ... this effort to honor the represented has the effect of centering the representer. Jamison, for whom the themes of imagination, narration, and metaphor will never not be seductive, endlessly elevates the act of portrayal above the thing being portrayed. While this doesn’t invalidate her ethical inquiries, it does reorient them ... That Jamison’s essays are continually searching for their true subject, like wanderers on romantic quests, contributes to their aura of rigor and humility. But seeking can become its own kind of stasis, and I caught myself wishing, as I read this new volume, for Jamison to push beyond articulate hunger ... If Make It Scream, Make It Burn at times feels invested in challenging Jamison’s earlier ideas about empathy, what it actually moderates is her romanticism ... It is true that the distance between who you are and who you long to be—as a woman, as a writer—is interesting. But, as Jamison realizes, there are many ways to be interesting. A whale being a whale is interesting. Jamison being herself is interesting. To be released from metaphor is not the same as to be cut off from meaning.

Jamison makes no claims to objectivity in her reporting. Quite the contrary. An overarching concern in Make It Scream, Make It Burn is with 'the fantasy of objectivity.' Even when reporting on a blue whale whose unusual song becomes a rallying cry for lonely people, or a family invested in the idea that their toddler's nightmares channel his previous life as a pilot shot down by the Japanese in 1945, she investigates her own process and feelings with at least as much rigor as her research into the subjects themselves. Yes, this can lead to a self-involved form of meta-journalism. But the overall result is a heady hybrid of journalism, memoir, and criticism ... Jamison has come a long way from the young woman who struggled to stave off loneliness with starvation and inebriation. In these tributes to what she has described as 'the deep realms of enchantment lodged inside ordinary life,' she shows—as she did in The Empathy Exams—that she's not afraid to buck the trend toward ironic detachment, even at the risk of sentimentality. This is a writer who is incapable of being uninteresting.

... presents a curiosity cabinet of topics ... These pieces have only the barest of connective tissues: Jamison wrestling with herself to find common ground with other humans or, as she puts it, 'writing about lives or beliefs that others might have scoffed at' ... [Jamison] comes off as sheltered ... After a quickie marriage, [Jamison] finds herself a stepmother overnight. What follows is a piece grappling with the complications of that new role. She overthinks this one: We don’t need a history of stepmother-related folklore or a Pew Research Center study to understand the very primal situation of a woman taking care of a child that isn’t hers. We only need Jamison’s heartbreaking anecdotes about being scolded by a stranger for buying her stepdaughter too much ice cream, because she doesn’t know what was 'too much ... If this book has a through-line, it’s the idea of wonder.

... composed almost entirely of previously published pieces, an occupational hazard that can make the reader feel as if she’s wandered into a party to which she wasn’t invited ... Jamison’s journalistic battle between sentiment and detachment rages on, sometimes resulting in texture, sometimes in tedium ... Without question, Jamison has impeccable taste in her own ideas, selecting fringe subjects and following them to the end of the road ... If the first section is the most fully realized, the second is the most thematically rickety ... Let no one accuse Jamison of living an unexamined life, but inertia can dull her points ... It’s just strange that someone who has focused so much of her writing on the body — hers, other people’s — can come off as a bit bloodless, neither screaming nor burning, her descriptions vying to out-flat one another ... Reviews of essay collections invariably note the 'strongest' pieces, but Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a reminder that strength is not a catchall. If we decide strength is about structure and elucidation, then most of these essays are heavyweight boxers. If, however, strength is about persuasion, transformation or the evocation of emotion, it’s in short supply here. We are all Percival Lowell, our lives subject to the imprint of our own gaze. Stare too long at the gaze itself and it becomes hard to see what you’re looking at.

Ms. Jamison turns her careful, exacting gaze on herself. Here are essays on the strangeness and mystery of ordinary life—broken relationships, longing and loneliness, becoming a stepmother, giving birth. Her closing portrayal of pregnancy, set against her adolescent eating disorder, reads like a prayer and a love letter ... Ms. Jamison...[has] been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, but [she is] different enough from those figures...to make one a little suspicious of the comparison. Are those the only terms we have for making sense of female cultural critics? The better praise may be to say that [she is] expanding the pantheon.

If the personal essay is dead, Leslie Jamison offers a map for moving forward using an old technique — New Journalism. Her latest, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, provides a stunning example of how to interrogate our collective consciousness without losing — but not relying on, either — the author’s role in the whole affair. In fourteen essays, Jamison reveals her knack for hypnotizing, in-depth reporting, while holding the reality of her subjectivity and imperfections at arm’s length. She neither aims for hard news nor hot takes. Instead, Jamison’s essays reveal the fruits of patient research and measured prose ... what Jamison can do with a month is more than most writers could do given six. The facts would be the same, but few can make the words sing like this, and even fewer can take subjects like the world’s loneliest whale or a slapdash travel magazine assignment to Sri Lanka and gently nestle them within today’s volatile emotional, social, and political core. It’s new journalism for a new era ... Jamison can do it all.

A tattoo that runs up the arm of acclaimed essayist Leslie Jamison reads Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, or 'I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.' Her new collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, puts her tattoo to the test ... In my favorite essay, she traces the unraveling of Walker Evans and James Agee’s trip to the South, which they completed on Fortune magazine’s dime in 1936 and which resulted in the widely acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. Her astute analysis of the differences between the draft of the magazine article and the published book blew me away ... Nothing human is alien to me. For her readers’ sakes, I hope Jamison will keep pursuing this ideal.

Here we see the territory [Jamison's] writing inhabits: self-questioning while at the same time empathetic, dubious and credible at once. In such a landscape, resolution is, at best, construction or compromise ... What Jamison is after is a kind of radical honesty: the ongoing inquiry of a mind at work. That this is not a new issue, but infuses all her writing, is the whole idea—even when she is her own subject, as in the last group of essays in the collection, which deal with family and marriage and parenthood ... Projection, longing, and (yes) empathy: as Jamison recognizes, every narrative remains conditional, leaving us between proximity and distance, in relation with one another and yet at the same time alone.

If The Empathy Exams was concerned with the practice of identification, Make It Scream seems to propose an ontology that makes such identification possible: We can connect with others because we are all, deep down, the same. It’s possible that relinquishing the ego is a useful practice for a journalist. Jamison’s determination to avoid quick judgments gives her a keen eye and often endows her reporting with clarity and restraint. But she is primarily a personal writer, which raises the inevitable question: How does the personal essayist write about a self that she believes to be unoriginal and interchangeable? ... The problem is not a lack of specificity ... But there is a dashed-off, generic quality to the writing, as though the profusion of concrete nouns is meant to disguise the absence of a distinct authorial consciousness ... The paradox is that Jamison’s eagerness to connect forecloses, in the end, the kind of intimacy that readers look for in an essayist—an honesty unconstrained by the sociable compromises and false niceties that color so much public discourse. In diluting her life to make it broadly relatable, Jamison betrays a lack of faith in the very ideals on which she has staked her brand ... It’s often said that empathy is impossible because we, as a culture, have lost faith in the ability to understand and inhabit other lives. But it can also break down when writers stop believing that their private self is a reliable locus of truth—or, worse, when they lose sight of the self entirely.

Leslie Jamison confirms the praise heaped on 2014's The Empathy Exams for her uncanny ability to blend perceptive reportage with intensely personal essays in consistently fresh, dynamic prose ... Though pieces of Jamison's personal life are threaded throughout her reporting, the collection concludes with some of the confessional writing that made her memoir The Recovering so revealing ... The book's concluding piece, 'The Quickening,' movingly traces the arc of Jamison's pregnancy and the birth of her first child, juxtaposed against her own past struggle with an eating disorder. In these and all the other essays in this book, Jamison consistently demonstrates her 'willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit.' All of her readers are the beneficiaries of that rare gift.

As riveting as ever, Jamison’s writing elicited within me many of the same responses I felt while reading her previous essay collection, The Empathy Exams: enlightenment, amusement, and of course, empathy itself ... Jamison isn’t trying to convince me or you or any of her readers of anything except that perhaps this unsureness we feel toward the unknown—this uneasiness—is absolutely essential. Perhaps, when we try to tell a story that is not our own, we should be asking ourselves, What am I doing here, anyway? And perhaps this question belongs in the narrative, even if we don’t know the answer.

The organization of the collection — the three sections, the order of the essays, the way each essay subtly or overtly connects to others — contributes to a satisfying unity that feels organic, no matter how fully intended ... [Jamison's] empathy is not something she puts on in order to wheedle her way into people’s confidence, and it is precisely the insights that she brings from her own experience that make her writing so thoroughly humane. Certainly, it is what draws me to her work ... This essay collection neither screams nor burns. I’ve already read it twice, and I know that I will read it again when I need an infusion of that signature Jamison observant, open-minded, empathetic humanity.

The organization of the collection — the three sections, the order of the essays, the way each essay subtly or overtly connects to others — contributes to a satisfying unity that feels organic, no matter how fully intended ... [Jamison's] empathy is not something she puts on in order to wheedle her way into people’s confidence, and it is precisely the insights that she brings from her own experience that make her writing so thoroughly humane. Certainly, it is what draws me to her work ... This essay collection neither screams nor burns. I’ve already read it twice, and I know that I will read it again when I need an infusion of that signature Jamison observant, open-minded, empathetic humanity ... Jamison interleaves her own narrative with others, recounting milestone life events while amplifying voices that aren’t loud enough (and in one case, a whale). Perhaps all writing is an innate, primal scream, and Jamison – astutely – knows and embodies this with compassion and vigour.

These essays are all driven by a deep, restless curiosity about the breadth of the human experience and the ways in which it is captured and explored. Many of Jamison’s observations about the work of other artists are equally applicable to her own ... Jamison and her subjects also share a reverence for art and the meaning it offers us, even as they all question their own veracity and motives with every breath. Beyond the wonderfully unusual content, this collection is also notable for its brilliant writing. Jamison’s words are poised and original; her excruciatingly articulate yet always compassionate observations are compelling, regardless of topic.

In Make It Scream, Make It Burn, Leslie Jamison continues her interrogation of the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, modest, and humble—a wabi-sabi essayist ... where the essays in the previous collection were tinged with physical pain and emotional suffering, the subjects in Make It Scream, Make It Burn feature a range of emotional states, including more than one essay that explores the permanent presence of joy ... Jamison points out being in recovery has taught her to avoid 'contempt prior to investigation,' that is, to keep an open mind when hearing others’ narratives of their lives and beliefs ... Jamison approached reincarnation not as the skeptic determined to expose its believers as delusional nor as a believer; this allowed her to ask better questions about human nature ... Jamison is stepmother to a six-year old daughter whose biological mother died when she was three. She recounts their relationship in a section that also explores how stepmothers are portrayed in fairy tales—i.e., largely as evil. This is rich soil that feminists have long tilled, but the writing is oddly arid here. I found myself wondering if Jamison, sensing that she needed to respect her stepdaughter’s privacy, held back.

These days, Jamison is sober, married and successful ...The wide-ranging essays of – circling themes of intimacy and obsession – show how fertile stability can be ... [Jamison's] language is typically lush ...Jamison picks excellent topics for her reported pieces ... Until this book, I preferred Jamison’s journalistic writing to her personal essays ... I find her more plausible and interesting here, at the Disney Store, anxiously looking for a toy that will win over her stepdaughter; in Las Vegas, sticking to mocktails and feeling deprived...on the toilet, turning in an edit and signing off, 'PS I am in labour.' The minor dramas of her sober, settled life are more compelling than her self-cutting or her eating disorder ... It is usually considered a weakness for a collection to include essays that have already appeared in magazines. But here, those stories, with their revisions and addendums, feel like proof of concept: the writer’s work is never done.

In her new essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Leslie Jamison writes about subjects as disparate as you can imagine. From blue whales to the Museum of Broken Hearts to Sri Lanka, she lends a fascinating gravity to seemingly mundane topics. What brings the essays together, other than Jamison’s own lyrical and ruminative prose, is not always immediately clear ... Jamison’s willingness to inhabit corners of society others overlook is, perhaps, the glue that holds the book together ... Elsewhere, though, the reader might want more than Jamison provides. Her writing is lovely; her thinking is at once intellectual and accessible; her subjects are fascinating. And yet, in many of the essays, the end result feels like less than its parts. Jamison’s ability to blur the lines between memoir and reportage has set her apart as a writer, and when she’s at her best, there are few like her. But she sometimes loses the thread when she shifts focus between herself and the subject. While the prose in Make It Scream, Make It Burn is beautiful, the meaning of it all never comes to the surface.

There are so many ways that a follow-up can disappoint and, as great as it is, Make It Scream, Make It Burn will surely disappoint some ... Jamison is an expert at restraint. She often holds her opinions back to let her readers come to their own conclusions, and she regularly keeps essays from becoming too personal to ensure the subject at hand isn’t overshadowed. But it’s when she lets the reins out—when she momentarily puts her journalist and literary-critic selves to the side—that her talent becomes more obvious ... Despite these gems of forward motion, Make It Scream, Make It Burn doesn’t have the same energy of The Empathy Exams. In large part, it’s simply because the book is so neatly organized ... The book is perhaps more coherent because of it, but it also creates spots where the pace slows to a crawl—especially in the middle section, where a series of three art and literary criticism essays bogs the book down, despite each essay working individually ... Still, Make It Scream is easily one of the best essay collections of the year, if not of the past decade. Jamison is a superstar of personal essay for a reason—not only is she a great prose stylist and meticulous researcher, she’s also infinitely curious. It’s this curiosity that makes everything she writes so infectious and makes this collection what it is: a wise and open assortment of essays that, throughout, feels like a gift.

...all written with care and intricacy ... Jamison’s observational skills, genuine empathy, and lack of sentimentality create an intelligent blending of journalism, scholarship, and memoir.

An edgy spirit of inquiry, a fascination with obsession, a penchant for sharing personal experiences, and incandescent writing skills make Jamison an exciting premier essayist ... Magnetizing and thought-provoking.

These illuminating and ruminative essays from Jamison...explore obsession and alienation, combining reportage, memoir, and philosophy ... Jamison details struggles with intimacy and a series of doomed relationships, hitting a high note with her consideration of the evil stepmother archetype in the light of becoming a stepmother herself. Jamison is positively brilliant when penetrating a subject and unraveling its layers of meaning ... Fans of the author’s unique brand of perceptiveness will be delighted.

A collection of essays, some journalistic, some critical, some memoiristic, all marked by the author’s distinct intelligence ... Jamison thinks and writes so elegantly, the subjects that serve as many of her jumping-off points risk feeling superfluous to the real business of her essaying. Still, as with nearly all of her writing, this one is well worth reading. A commendable essay collection by one of the leading practitioners of the form.