What book reviewers are saying this week

October 27, 2008

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING...

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: The Making of an Icon
By Mark Bostridge / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“Mark Bostridge ... has produced ... a dense and compelling biography of a woman who is rightly venerated but often too simplistically understood.” – ALEXANDRA MULLEN, The Wall Street Journal

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION: Composing an American Life
By John Adams / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This book, Adams’s first (and, let’s hope, not his last), is a cogent account of its author’s escape from the world of ­audience-alienating ‘process’ music absorbed with its own making and his arrival at a place where intellectual adventurism and robust emotion coexist – a pilgrimage from the Land Without Feelings to Hallelujah Junction.”– DAVID HAJDU, The New York Times

TITANTIC’S LAST SECRETS: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler
By Brad Matsen / Twelve
“Who’d have thought a tale of a debate over good versus poor naval design could be so compellingly told?”
REBECCA JONES, Rocky Mountain News