"Mad Women" by Jane Maas

In "Mad Women," Jane Maas sets out to ask one cigarette-burning question: How accurately does Mad Men depict its respective time period? According to Jim Kelly of Bloomberg, "Maas answers the question, all right, but in such a rambling way that the reader wishes show runner Matthew Weiner had edited the book." James Rosen of The Boston Globe also takes issue with Maas's writing: "'Mad Women' is no literary achievement; its use of language, while breezy and engaging, is unrelentingly pedestrian." Still, Rosen continues, "the chief value of 'Mad Women' is the witness it bears for younger women about the snobbery and sexism their mothers and grandmothers endured as the price of entry into mid-century American professional life."
Biometric: 3.5/5 stars

"The Man Without a Face" by Masha Gessen

Timed for Russia's elections, The Telegraph's A D Miller suggests that Masha Gessen's "view of him [Putin] as a bloodthirsty tyrant is incomplete...Her personal animus and reporting both charge and limit her courageous book." Hear-hearing Miller's assessment, Gessen's "excessively prosecutorial focus on Mr. Putin," writes Paul Starobin of The Wall Street Journal "is not uniformly convincing." Be that as it may, James Meek over at The Guardian calls Gessen's book "clear" and "brave," making a "strong case that Putin is not merely turning a blind eye to embezzlement and skimming," but that he is also "an arch-practitioner."
Biometric: 3.5/5

"Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America" by Christopher Bram

Despite "some errors of detail," Peter Parker of The Washington Post notes how Christopher Bram's new group-biography "properly sifts wheat from chaff and leaves the reader at what he [Bram] calls the 'high tide' of gay literature at the end of the 20th century." John Leland of The New York Times suggests that "by compressing literary history to a coherent movement, Bram concentrates mainly on the obvious, and by ignoring outliers he is left with a canon too thin to fill a summer vacation. The books are triumphs first, literature second." Finally, Brad Gooch at The Daily Beast describes "Eminent Outlaws" as "the next (last?) step in reporting on literary lives that traces back to the gay dinner parties" of the 1970s.
Biometric: 4/5 stars