Rachel Shteir calls Liz Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family an “ambitious new book,” but feels that “one of the maddening things” about it “is that Mundy never met a sociologist she didn’t like.” (NYTimes)

Dwight Silverman declares Christopher Moore’s Sacré Bleu “big fun”—if “you don’t mind some occasional narrative aimlessness.” (San Jose Mercury News)

Ron Charles says that, despite a previous misstep, Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here is “an extraordinary novel, the work of an artist with profound insight into human nature and the mature talent to deliver it just the way he wants.” (Washington Post)

ManOfLaBook.com finds a great deal of depth in Moshe Arens’ Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (seattlepi.com)

Agnes Torres Al-Shibibi discovers a “touching, uplifting memoir of the happiness and hardship of living and loving in star-crossed Haiti” in Julia Alvarez’s A Wedding in Haiti. (Seattle Times)

John Bateson’s The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge is “the first book to be devoted exclusively to the continuing problem of suicides off the bridge.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ceri Radford finds the worldview that would go on to inform the Millennium trilogy in The Expo Files: Articles by the Crusading Journalist by Steig Larsson, in which the late author “rails against violent prejudice in various forms, devoting particular energy to the mistreatment of women.” (The Telegraph)

Pamela Paul declares Jorge Aguirre’s Giants Beware! “a rollicking fun story if not entirely high-minded literature.” (NYTimes)

Gayle Brandeis says Terry Tempest Williams “displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions” in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Kevin Allman counts the myriad ways Joseph Olshan’s mystery, Cloudland, falls short. (Washington Post)

Lesley McDowell is underwhelmed by Kimberly Cutter’s debut Joan of Arc novel, The Maid. (The Independent)

Jessica Gelt says that Cheryl Strayed turns a journey across the Pacific Crest Trail into “an exercise of triumph over grief” in her memoir, Wild. (LATimes)

Leah Greenblatt gives Annalena McAfee’s The Spoiler a B+, largely on the strength of “the author’s synapse-crackling prose: spiky, vivid, and almost pathologically clever.” (EW.com)

Matthew Zingg discovers “a burgeoning tension between the spiritual life of the imagination and its blood and guts container—the forehead, the hips, the heart—that is both dire and light” in Melissa Broder’s second poetry collection, Meat Heart. (The Rumpus)

Rhonda Dickey says there’s “not a moment of preciousness or sentimentality” in Helen Simpson’s collection, In-Flight Entertainment. (Philly.com)

A.N. Wilson’s Hitler: A Short Biography is “a fascinating portrait” according to Bruce Ramsey, but falls short of solving the mystery of the notorious dictator. (Seattle Times)

Liesl Bradner enjoys the “witty, personal account” of Jane Maas’ Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond. (Chicago Tribune)

Helen Oyeyemi is impressed by Children in Reindeer Woods, Icelandic writer Kristin Omarsdottir’s first work to be translated into English. (NYTimes)

Theo Tait finds that Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting prequel, Skagboys, is too long and covers too little new ground. (The Guardian)

Gillan Tett declares White House Burning The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, a “wake-up call on the budget deficit. (Financial Times)

Peter Mack finds a “glimpse at a nation of people free to seek their own revelation, with all the messy pluralism of democracy” in essay collection, Sweet Heaven When I Die, by Jeff Sharlet. (The Rumpus)

Daphne Guinness says that Carrie Fisher’s Shockoholic falls flat, and that the “belly laughs have gone AWOL - packed their bags and vamoosed.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Bob Minzesheimer casts John Grisham’s “baseball morality tale,” Calico Joe, as “no World Series thriller decided in the last at-bat. It’s more like a pleasant, midseason afternoon at the ballpark when the home team creeps back in the game and wins 4-2.” (USAToday)

Paula L. Woods discovers “a thrilling, irresistible masterwork of love, guilt and revenge” in Olen Steinhauer’s An American Spy. (LATimes)

John Wilwol discovers a “zany new version” of the death of painter Vincent van Gogh in Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art. (Washington Post)

Martin Chilton finds that Kurt Vonnegut “does not come out well as a person” in Charles J Shields’ biography, And So It Goes. (The Telegraph)

Melissa Allison says that Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business “makes a compelling case about a pervasive but little-known aspect of how we operate as humans, businesses and societies.” (Seattle Times)

Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God produces “fantastic results,” according to Philip Zaleski. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Robert Bianco declares Jacqueline Winspear’s latest mystery, Elegy For Eddie, “another Maisie Dobbs masterpiece.” (USAToday)

April Rabkin says Michelle Dammon Loyalka’s Eating Bitterness: Stories From the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration is “fascinating,” with the “lasting power as a historical record of the biggest, fastest urbanization in human history.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

In the afterglow of the short story collection Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, Jessica Freeman-Slade calls author Kevin Moffett “brisk, funny, whip smart, and worth forming a habit for.” (The Rumpus)

Kevin Telfer finds Andrew Motion’s sequel Silver: Return to Treasure Island,  “playful,” but finds it falls short in the suspension-of-disbelief department. (The Telegraph)

Andrew Motion calls Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears “an impressive achievement.” (The Guardian)

David E. Hoffman breaks down Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. (Washington Post)

Fiona Sturgess finds a great deal to admire in singer/songwriter Carole King and, more to the point, her autobiography, A Natural Woman. (The Independent)

David B. Williams says that John Maxtone-Graham’s Titanic Tragedy reflects the author’s “deep passion and knowledge” and recommends it, despite the deluge of books on the subject. (Seattle Times)

Deirdre Donahue finds too much “excess verbiage” in Joyce Carol Oates’ Mudwoman. (USAToday)

Martin Ruben feels led a little astray by “words from the languages other than English spoken in South Africa (the country has no fewer than 11 official languages!) and local references that convey the texture of South African conversation” in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present. (LATimes)

Dale B. Martin explains his appreciation of Elaine Pagels’ Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. (NYTimes)

Anthony Dummins dissects Charlotte Rogan’s debut, The Lifeboat. (The Telegraph)

In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World by Tom Holland is a “characteristically eloquent and necessarily broad-brush study of the rise of monotheism in the eastern Mediterranean and Near-East from the third to seventh centuries AD,” says reviewer Richard Miles. (Financial Times)

Ellen Miller-Mack finds the “pleasure of reading a very talented young poet” in Carmen Giminez Smith’s The City She Was. (The Rumpus)

Adan Woog says Christopher Moore’s novel Sacré Bleu is a “a mind-bending tribute to artists, the creative process and the color blue.” (Seattle Times)

Fiona Wright goes between the covers of Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, edited by John Leonard, and discovers a “dextrous and talented lot.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Seth Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night earns an A from Anthony Breznican, who says the it’s author’s “depiction of sacred figures as flawed humans that makes the book feel like a secret account of events that have been sanitized by legend.” (EW.com)

Lucy Scholes suggests that Greg Baxter redeems himself with his novel, The Apartment. She apparently was not a fan of his memoir. (The Independent)

Don Oldenburg declares Clint Hill’s Mrs. Kennedy and Me the story of a “relationship of respect, protection and love.” (USAToday)

Tom Epperson’s “noir tale of revenge and greed,” Sailor, impresses Nancie Clare, who finds that “the solution to the deeply twisted calculus of the plot is surprising, sad and wholly satisfactory.” (LATimes)

David D’Arcy finds that implicit in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works “is the troubling truth that human capital is woefully underused, and that most economic activity is structured to make it irrelevant.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Thornton McCamish says that it is the “ordinary human mystery” P.A. O’Reilly’s characters in The Fine Color of Rust “that keeps us guessing and it is the novel’s unsentimental celebration of simply getting by that makes it sing.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

In Brothers (& Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving, Donna Britt “gives us all a way to think about what it might mean to love ourselves without forgetting how to love those whom we feel obligated to protect, and without pretending that our desire to protect alone is enough to fend off all of the world’s waiting dangers.”  (Washington Post)

Janet Maslin goes between the covers of Ron Rash’s novel, The Cove. (NYTimes)

John McMurtrie finds Anne Enright’s “unmistakably Irish sense of gloom,” but also her tenderness, in Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ed Smith’s Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters prompts David Runciman to ponder whether “the pop-psychology genre starting to cannibalise itself.” (The Guardian)

In The Missing Shade of Blue, Catherine Taylor says that Jennie Erdal “prefers to take a discursive and dispassionate path, with uneven results.” (The Telegraph)

Carol Memmott declares Adriana Trigiani’s Shoemaker’s Wife a “perfect fit as a love story” and awards it four stars.  (USATODAY)

Rachel Hore finds a “stylish, witty and inventive” novel in Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests, but worried that it “is perhaps too much about the writer at play to satisfy Sadie Jones’s hungry fans.” (The Independent)

Lisa Wells says that David Wagoner’s After the Point of No Return “gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.” (The Rumpus)

John Timpane goes along with Lauren Winner on her spiritual quest in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. (Philly.com)

Jeff Ayers discovers “a pitch-perfect first novel” in Kieran Shields The Truth of All Things. (Seattle Times)

Leeann Zouras offers up a double-dose of “postapocalyptic” young adult novel reviews: Dan Wells’ Partials and Julianna Baggot’s Pure. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Edmund Gordon has mixed feelings on Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears, saying that the author’s “storytelling skills are on display in a novel of love, grief and automata, but the tale lacks a human heart.” (The Guardian)

Korina Lopez awards Kate Alcot’s The Dressmaker 3 and 1/2 stars: “Seamlessly stitching fact and fiction together, Alcott creates a hypnotic tale.” (USAToday)

Upon experiencing Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Ben Marcus declares the author “either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent.” (NYTimes)

Ron Charles says Anne Tyler’s “ability to survey the emotional terrain of grief remains sharp” in her 19th novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye. (Washington Post)

Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories “illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom,” according to Ana Grouverman. (The Rumpus)

While intrigued, Jon Ronson suggests that Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, “can be a bit of a slog, not always a page turner.” (The Guardian)

Andrew Klausner shares his thoughts on The Start-Up of YOU, by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (Forbes)

Lev Grossman cracks open Derf Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer for “the creepiness factor” and finds “a devastatingly accurate fictional evocation” of his childhood. (TIME)

Leyla Sanai declares Patrick Flanery’s debut effort, Absolution, “an exceptionally intelligent, multi-layered novel encompassing politics, history, a gripping storyline and complex characters.” (The Independent)

Elysa Gardner discovers accounts “as compassionate as they are witty” in Frank Langella’s Dropped Names: A Memoir. (USAToday)

Sunsan Carpenter gets a kick out of Jennifer A. Nielsen’s The False Prince, calling it a “romp of a medieval-themed, middle-grade novel.” (LATimes)

Jeff Greenfield is intrigued by Matt Ruff’s alternate historical novel, Mirage, but ultimately finds it wearisome. (Washington Post)

Catherin Tung says that Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral’s collaboration on Chopsticks “yields a novel that makes our hearts move faster than our brains.” (The Rumpus)

Charles R. Cross finds in Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America “a complicated story, involving four separate defendants, several trials, various appeals, numerous defense attorneys, multiple judges and many different points of law.” (Seattle Times)

Jeff Giles finds an engaging memoir that rings true in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal and awards it an A-. (EW.com)

David Perlmen praises Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places as a “literate, often poetic and thoroughly entertaining book.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Janet Maslin declares The Master Blaster, P.F. Kluge’s new novel, “stingingly funny.” (NYTimes)

Martin Chilton discovers a “thrilling adventure story for young adults set in the world of top-level riding” in Lauren St. John’s The One Dollar Horse. (The Telegraph)