The Week in Reviews

A compendium of notable reviews
by Kat Warren

>> “The End of Food” by Paul Roberts
from The New Yorker
Is the world’s food system collapsing?

>> “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill
from The New York Times Book Review
Dwight Garner pronounces this “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

>> “The House on Fortune Street” by Margot Livesey
from The Denver Post
This “addictive” novel “is constructed of four narratives, interlocked so that it feels like a series of novellas that build around a tragedy.”

>> “The Honey Spinner: On the Trail of Ancient Honey, Vanishing Bees and the Politics of Liquid Gold” by Grace Pundyk
from The Australian
The honey business is byzantine; who knew?

>> “Wit’s End” by Karen Joy Fowler
from The New York Times Book Review
“Jane Austen meets Nancy Drew,” opines the NYT reviewer.

>> “Blue Horse Dreaming” by Melanie Wallace
from The Guardian
Hilary Mantel says this novel’s “deepest theme concerns the loss of language.”

>> “Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids” by Julie Salamon
from The Los Angeles Times
Deemed an “unnecessary” book by the reviewer, this review is, nonetheless, a hoot.

>> “Deaf Sentence” by David Lodge
from The Financial Times
A “funny, humane novel.”