"You learn, cry and laugh, and have to understand history — and have to read 26 languages. If only he hadn't gone crazy. He was a wizard."

"God, I love this book. It's the history of an utterly depressing war with no real nobility, that ultimately descends into cannibalism. Right up my alley."

"It has recipes in it, but it also talks about the social and racial history of soul food. It inspired my 200-day run with vegetarianism."

"This is the western to end all westerns. Its rich tableaux of the borderlands mixed with unrelenting violence creates an inimitable portrait of our country's history."

"The best music documentary ever made, period. It is history on film chronicling the end of the sixties. Watch it all fall apart before your eyes."

"Yuknavitch takes on art, sex, and the traumas of history in a gut-punch of a novel that reads like nothing else in current American fiction."