Michiko Kakutani peruses a “daring and remarkable novel” set against the oppressive backdrop of North Korea in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. (NYTimes)

Bob Minzesheimer gives Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas three-and-a-half stars. (USAToday)

Terry Eagleton says that what Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists does is “is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure.” And that’s the nice part of the review. (The Guardian)

Dinesh Ramde finds Lunatics, by Dave Barry and Alan Zeibel, “creative, unusual and over the top.” (Chicago Sun-Times)

David Peak takes on the monumentally challenging task of reviewing a book of poems written in Russian, Novaya Yunost’s A Fire-Proof Box. (The Rumpus)

Lionel Shriver comes away unimpressed with Miranda July’s It Chooses You, which “interweaves memoir with cameos of strangers she sought out while struggling to finish the script of her second film.” (Financial Times)

Catherine Taylor discovers a “self-denying yet resonant work” in Samantha Harvey’s “troubling second novel of a modern-day Socrates,” All is Song. (The Telegraph)

Ben Ratliff takes trip in the wayback machine in Ed Sanders’ FUG YOU: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. (NYTimes)

Dwight Garner comes away impressed with Gil Scott-Heron’s posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday. (NYTimes)

Peter Lewis lauds how Julian Flynn Siler “fashions a sense of intimacy in mood and atmosphere” in Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Adrian Turpin finds Tessa McWatt’s symbolism a bit overbearing in her newest novel, Vital Signs. (Financial Times)

Carol Memmott discovers the fascinating history of one of America’s favorite handguns in Paul M. Barrett’s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. (USAToday)

M.E. Collins finds a continuation of the “popularity and charm” of V.I. Warshawski in Sara Paretsky’s Breakdown. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Michael Moorcock salutes Alastair Brotchie’s take on “one of the most influential writers of modern times” in Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life. (The Guardian)

Connie Schultz goes between the covers of The Obamas by Jodi Kantor. (NYTimes)

Steven Rea acknowledges his fascination with the subject of (though he laments the dry writing in) Richard Rhodes’ Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish earns a B+ from Rob Brunner. (EW)

In Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery, Sinclair McKay ends up “feeling, despite all the darkness, that Eco is one of literature’s greatest optimists.” (The Telegraph)

Craig Wilson dives into Roger Rosenblatt’s “meditation on the universal experience of grief,” Kayak Morning. (USAToday)

Carolyn Kellogg peruses he “big, important story” in Connie Rice’s memoir Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Kill Zones to the Courtroom. (LATimes)

Peter O’Brien has mixed feelings about Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. (The Globe and Mail)

Nick Owchar offers up a twofer, as he reviews Stephen Mitchell’s Jersey Shore-esque take on Homer’s classic, The Iliad, and Harold Bloom’s study of the King James Bible, The Shadow of a Great Rock. (LATimes)

Emma Hagestadt gives (brief) approval to The London Train by Tessa Hadley. (The Independent)

Richard Williams finds The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus rather flimsy, mostly due to the flimsiness of its subject matter. (The Guardian)

Mike Fischer is less than impressed with David Snodin’s inability to breathe life into Shakespeare’s greatest villain in Iago. (JSSOnline)

Charles Isherwood finds a quirky, funny (but not all that effective) romp through the minefield of etiquette in Henry Alford’s Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners. (NYTimes)

Boyd Tonkin revels in the “startling snapshots and vivid discoveries” contained within Charles Nicholl’s Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations. (The Independent)

Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel, by Nicholas Blanford, offers “an intimate window into Hezbollah’s theater of operations,” but reviewer Tony Badran finds some of the author’s analysis lacking. (Washington Post)

James Camp wonders if Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Map and the Territory, isn’t deliberately stale. (New York Observer)

Shawn Syms gets a contact high from the short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles. (The Rumpus)

Gregory Rodriguez lauds Tom Zoeller’s “quirky, uneven, brave and astonishingly heartfelt” book A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Ken Dilanian finds some unpleasant realities in Matthew M. Aid’s Intel Wars. (LATimes)

Malcolm Forbes enjoys the ride of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s long-lost account, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk. (The Rumpus)

Alan Cheuse finds Tom Clancy “at the top of his game” in his new thriller, Locked On. (Chicago Tribune)

Stephan Lee gives Penelope Lively’s How It All Began a B+. (Entertainment Weekly)

Dwight Garner discovers “mostly slack and unsustained” work in William Gibson’s non-fiction collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor. (NYTimes)

In Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, Holly Bruback finds a worthy addition to the author’s “entertaining and idiosyncratic catalog of human nature.” (NYTimes)

Christopher Hirst takes a literary roller coaster ride through PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe. (The Independent)

Jacob Silverman recommends some”great weekend reads.” (The Daily Beast)

Chloe Joan Lopez applauds Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort’s second book pf poetry, Collected Body. (The Rumpus)

Andrew Ervin welcomes the posthumous publication of The Third Reich, a piece of Roberto Bolaño juvenilia, with a lukewarm review and a recommendation only for those with an abiding interest in the author’s body of work. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Boyd Tonkin gives Christie Watson’s Tiny Sunbirds Far Away a thumbs up for the “vigour of its characters and the pace of its prose.” (The Independent)

Tony Perry finds a powerful punch packed in Lewis Sorley’s Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. (LATimes)

Jonathan Rée savors the provocative nature of Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet. (The Guardian)

Elizabeth Hand sees some fresh moments in an oft-used fiction trope in Alma Katsu’s The Taker. (Washington Post)

Blogcritics’ El Bicho surveys the “grand collection” of pieces in Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson. (Seattlepi.com)

Nick Owchar finds “a pleasing introduction for lay readers to a fascinating, murky topic” in Caroline Alexander’s Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons. (LATimes)

Michael Berry reviews the “best science fiction and fantasy books” of the year. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Patt Morrison comes away unimpressed with Amy Ephron’s memoir Loose Diamonds… and Other Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way. (LATimes)

Michael Eaude discovers a “fine first novel” in Matías Néspolo’s Seven Ways to Kill a Cat. (The Independent)

Barbara Berman swoons over W.S. Di Piero’s poetry collection, Nitro Nights. (The Rumpus)

Colin Burrow finds “a flawed but dazzling study of the origins of the renaissance”in The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. (The Guardian)

David L. Ulin revisits the reissue of Patti Smith’s “fluid, visionary, risky” prose poems, Woolgathering. (LATimes)

Peter Parker doubles down with a two-in-one review of Ronald Blythe’s At the Yeoman’s House and At Helpston. (The Telegraph)

Louis Bayard offers a review about a reviewer (and a heavyweight one, at that) in his examination of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. (Washington Post)

Chuck Leddy find a “masterful” chronicle of “the most difficult Christmas in American history” in Stanley Weintraub’s Pearl Harbor Christmas. (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

Shari Rosen gives a qualified thumbs-up to Mary Johnson’s An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life. (LATimes)

Jake Kerridge loves every minute of the long-lost crime novel by CS Forester, The Pursued. (The Telegraph)

Dwight Garner isn’t all that impressed with Clark Howard’s Living Large in Lean Times. (NYTimes)

Lynsey Hanley finds some interesting nuggets in Peter Doggett’s The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s. (The Guardian)

William Feaver finds some intriguing insights into a famous artist’s famous death in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White-Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life. (The Guardian)

Carmela Ciuraru says Don DeLillo’s first-ever collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda, was worth the wait. (USAToday)

Louis Sahagun discovers a “fascinating approach to moral guidance in an age of technological globalization and multicultural societies” in the Dalai Lama’s Beyond Religion. (LATimes)

Charles McGrath declares Stella Tillyard’s Tides of War a “welcome and entertaining contribution to the (historical fiction) genre.” (NYTimes)

Alana Semuels sees the convergence of reading and America’s celebrity-obsessed, voyeuristic culture in Michael Gross’ Unreal Estate. (LATimes)

The fascination with Scandinavian crime fiction rolls on with Jo Nesbø’s The Leopard. (USAToday)

Catherine Shoard finds Diane Keaton’s memoir Then Again “too self-effacing for comfort.” (The Guardian)

Michael Glover digs the depth of Da Vinci’s Ghost, Toby Lester’s in-depth study of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man.” (The Independent)

Lesley McDowell says Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds is a biography “that bears repeat readings.” (Independent UK)

Claire Messud goes deep between the covers of Michael Ondaatje’s newest novel, The Cat’s Table. (New York Review of Books)

In other biography news, Ophelia Field finds some new perspectives on a historical giant in Kate Chisholm’s Wits & Wive: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women. (The Telegraph)

Rosita Sweetman declares Eileen Battersby’s Ordinary Dogs “one of the best love stories you’ll read this year.” (Independent Ireland)

Don Noble finds Michael Martone’s Four for a Quarter: Fictions a “beastly clever” collection of experimental fiction. (Tuscaloosa News)

Jina Moore explores the harrowing tale of Minnesota priest John Kaiser’s death in Africa in Christopher Goffard’s You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya. (Star-Tribune)

Mary Foster applaud Detective Shane Scully’s return in Stephen J. Cannell’s Vigilante. (The Morning Sun)

Allan Kozinn seems genuinely fascinated with Beethoven in America, Michael Broyles examination of Americans’ perceptions of the great composer. (NYTimes)

P.D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from Liesl Schillinger. (NYTimes)

George Walden says Robert Service “tell(s) it like it is” in Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West. (The Telegraph)

Marcus Hearn’s The Hammer Vault is a satisfactory, if somewhat uneven, journey through the classic horror flicks of Hammer Films. (Blogcritics)

Wes Bausmith finds some keen insights into corporate branding Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks of Chermayeff & Geismar. (LATimes)