|
Outstanding
|
LA Weekly Claire Messud
Didion's observations are not new; but particular, and true, they are searing. They will explain much to those who have not suffered, and will articulate the grief of those who have.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Los Angeles Times Gideon Lewis-Kraus
[Didion's] admissions are severe and often excruciating. They also are as instructive, resonant and searing as her 40 years of sympathetic stories about how we deny our trouble discerning illusion from reality, how we pretend that things aren't falling apart. [2 Oct 2005]
|
|
Outstanding
|
New York Review Of Books John Leonard
I can't think of a book we need more than [Didion's] those of us for whom this life is it, these moments all the more precious because they are numbered.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Publishers Weekly
An indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning literature. [27 Jun 2005, p. 48]
|
|
Outstanding
|
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
An utterly shattering book that gives the reader an indelible portrait of loss and grief and sorrow, all chronicled in minute detail with the author's unwavering, reportorial eye.
|
|
Outstanding
|
The New York Times Book Review Robert Pinsky
Didion's book is thrilling and engaging--sometimes quite funny--because it ventures to tell the truth.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Chicago Sun-Times Stephen J. Lyons
An unforgettable lament that is both personal and universal. [Didion] has given the reader an eloquent starting point in which to navigate through the wilderness of grief.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
[Didion] has never been more forthcoming or affecting than she is here, offering grief-drenched flashbacks to a vital and contentious 40-year marriage. [7 Oct 2005, p. 80]
|
|
Outstanding
|
Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehie
If Didion's narrative sounds heartrending, it is--utterly so. But at the same time, it is a work of much majesty.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Salon Andrew O'Hehir
This chronicle of genuine grief and madness, this loving tribute to her real family, is also Didion's crowning literary achievement.
|
|
Outstanding
|
Slate Peter D. Kramer
The book is, as promised, extraordinary. The Year of Magical Thinking is raw, brutal, compact, precise, immediate, literate, and, given the subject matter, astonishingly readable.
|
|
Outstanding
|
San Francisco Chronicle Oscar Villalon
This work of what could be called "personal journalism" is as bracing an account of private disaster as any in years
|
|
Favorable
|
Daily Telegraph Alex Clark
[A] luminously shocking memoir of bereavement .
|
|
Favorable
|
Daily Telegraph Patrick Skene Catling
Clear and controlled, [Didion's] book seems at first to combine the cool styles of autopsy and psychoanalysis, but the underlying, gut-wrenching emotion soon becomes apparent.
|
|
Favorable
|
Chicago Tribune Conan Putnam
[A] remarkable memoir. [20 Nov 2005]
|
|
Favorable
|
London Review Of Books Michael Wood
Nothing is more moving in The Year of Magical Thinking than Didion’s austere management of her sorrow, her worry about self-pity, a form of thinking more disordered, we may feel, than any of her transparent fantasies of return and reversal.
|
|
Favorable
|
Houston Chronicle John Freeman
Stylistically, this is not Didion's most beautiful writing--it is too circumscribed to be that. But it is her most awesome performance of both participating in an event and watching it.
|
|
Favorable
|
The New Yorker
This book is about getting a grip and getting on; it's also a tribute to an extraordinary marriage.
|
|
Favorable
|
Village Voice Dennis Lim
The keening voice is as morbidly seductive and passively theatrical as ever: the poet of existential nausea, the sufferer of migraines, the compulsive weeper hiding her tears behind outsize sunglasses.
|
|
Favorable
|
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
The Year of Magical Thinking, though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty.
|
|
Favorable
|
Boston Globe Drew Limsky
In the matter-of-fact, almost comma-less prose that is her hallmark, Didion illuminates the bond between husband and wife in terms both homely and indelible.
|
|
Mixed
|
New York Observer Adam Begley
The splintered reveries are too scattered in time and place, both too thin and too crowded--sprinkled with names that may mean something to us in other contexts but add nothing here ... I'd like to read about Ms. Didion's marriage, but I'd like her to write about it as a reporter, not as a mourner.
|
|
Mixed
|
Kirkus Reviews
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion's earlier writing. [15 Jul 2005, p. 774]
|
|
Mixed
|
The Guardian Veronica Horwell
[Didion's] admitted new vulnerability and bewilderment do not square with her continued intense discipline of every comma.
|
