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reviews & praise

Reviews & Praise for William M. Arkin

Reviews & Praise for William M. Arkin

After decades of being a contributor at NBC News, William M. Arkin famously wrote a farewell note upon leaving the organization in January 2019.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021 & is available for pre-ordering now. Here are some reviews & praise for Arkin…

"On the Back of Our Images" Now Available

"On the Back of Our Images" Now Available

In early 2015, Tim was reading a book of critical analyses of the films of the Dardenne brothers, and it referred to two volumes of Luc Dardenne’s journals. He immediately searched online to buy them and was disappointed to learn that they were never translated into English.

Now, four years and three translators later, with help from the French Cultural Ministry’s prestigious CNL grant, Luc Dardenne’s On the Back of Our Images, Vol. 1 is now available for pre-order!

Reviews & Praise for "The Spud"

Reviews & Praise for "The Spud"

Through the infinite layers of experience, Brilliant grabs the reader by our shoulders.
— Jessie McCarty, for Hooligan Mag

Read an interview with Brielle Brilliant in Hooligan Mag


The writing zips between inner memory and outer world with such speed that the boundary between the two begins to melt away … To read The Spud is to find yourself at the center of a constellation of possibilities rather facing down a single hard, cool reality … Brilliant is masterful at conjuring this experience, playing and tinkering with the point at which narrative breaks down into naked, exposed words without ever letting them dissolve into chaos.
— Colin Flynn, for Cleveland Review of Books

Read a review of The Spud in Cleveland Review of Books


Startling and haunting, an unforgettable debut.
— David Gutowski, for Largehearted Boy

Check out Brielle Brilliant’s notes & music playlist for The Spud on Largehearted Boy

Reviews & Praise for “Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion“

“Their handling of athletes’ words is careful and respectful, and the results are surprising: profound, funny, poignant and occasionally beautiful."

review & excerpt at Flavorwire

 

“It's poetry that takes the very best of what is said in the heat of battle, and reforms those erratic sentences into a passionate profile of the player. "

review & excerpt at The Commish

 

"The interactions between media and players have become increasingly standardized—mindless cliches and then reporters trying to squeeze blood from those stones…the best way to create meaning is to chisel those stones down and then pile them up with a bunch of others into an interesting shape."

Q&A at Hardwood Paroxysm

 

"Hilarious and sometimes inspiring…"

interview at Philly.com

 

"Best of 2015" selection

CBC Books & Orlando Weekly & The Globe and Mail & Connected

 

"A substantial thread of Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion is that of the power and nature of human experience. If there is sublimity and humor, there is also the moral repugnance of Don Imus’ 2007 remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team alongside Fuzzy Zoeller’s offensive “joke” about Tiger Woods…"

review at The Found Poetry Review

 

"Language trickery peaks a few times when several voices merge and Malla and Parker present a poem with a group of indistinguishable narrators … It’s just one of many notes that these skilled poetic DJs hit in this unique and surprising book. Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion sets out to find the poetry in sports talk. Through clever sampling and an attention to sound and form, Pasha Malla and Jeff Parker succeed."

review at The Los Angeles Review

 

“… an interesting look into the lives of athletes while being evocative, substantial poetry.”

review at Lawrence.com

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Unmanned"

Reviews & Praise for William Arkin's "Unmanned"

William Arkin talked about his book, Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, on BookTV (C-SPAN), October 21, 2015.

His first work of fiction, History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11, will be out in 2021. Here are some reviews & praise for William Arkin’s Unmanned


… a personal meditation … This well-informed but quirky analysis of the development of drone warfare and its ongoing effect on the nation’s military strategy is the latest lament for the disappearance of personal honor and valor from warfare that began in 1914.
— Kirkus Reviews

Arkin insists that we must contemplates the ‘cost to society and humanity for even operating in this seemingly near-perfect way.’ Readers will have to navigate a minefield of technical details, acronyms, and political and military infighting, but Arkin makes worthwhile the effort of understanding both the extensive transformations modern militaries are experiencing and their far-from-perfect consequences.
— Publishers Weekly, in a starred review

Unmanned attempts to explain these views in a first-person narrative that is alternatively informative and quirky. The quirkiness derives from Arkin’s insistence that “to understand drones you have to understand Gilgamesh,” the main character in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a 5,000-year-old literary work. Arkin devotes a chapter to the topic and then returns to it from time to time throughout the book. The connections remain obscure, however, and the story he tells of the life of the drone program is not enhanced by his references to Gilgamesh. … Whether Unmanned’s forecast of an excessively automated future, as implied in the final chapter of the science fiction example, is a dilemma left to the reader. The facts of the drone program presented, however, are worth attention.
— CIA

Arkin makes clear that the sheer amount of data being collected ‘masks the intelligence’ …

Drones—and the ‘Data Machine’—give the illusion of being able to know, understand and control what is happening on the ground thousands of miles away via remote armed systems. The reality, as we shall no doubt continue to see, is just the opposite.
— Chris Cole, for DroneWars.net