What book reviewers are saying this week

TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq
By Linda Robinson / PublicAffairs
“Linda Robinson’s ‘Tell Me How This Ends’ is the first book about [the] new Iraq. It’s a first-rate piece of work, probing and conscientious, though reading a good-news book about one of America’s all-time bad-news stories can take some getting used to.”
– JAMES TRAUB, The New York Times

THE MEN IN MY LIFE
By Vivian Gornick / MIT Press
“Vivian Gornick makes you want to read. In her new collection of essays, ‘The Men in My Life,’ authors [Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, Allen Ginsberg and others], all great literary men, come alive on the page like great characters, bleeding, raging and most of all trying (but almost always failing) to love.”
– JUDITH LEWIS, The Los Angeles Times

HOLDING PATTERN
By Jeffrey Renard Allen / Graywolf
“ ‘Holding Pattern’ [is] a short-story collection of rare and scouring power.... Imaginative, empathic, brave, and beautifully told, these are astonishing and transcendent stories. “
– DONNA SEAMAN, The Chicago Tribune