The subject--Adam Worth--and time period of The Napoleon of Crime are fascinating. Unfortunately, the book's attempts to delve into Adam Worth's psychological make-up and motivations are so speculative and sophomoric that they ruin the reading experience. The entire book is structured around Worth's alleged attitude toward a painting he stole at one point in his illustrious career. Again and again the author returns to the painting and Worth's attitude toward it, attempting to create a character study that is entirely without foundation--a testament to the author's ignorance of psychology. As a book or a work of art The Napoleon of Crime has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. One cannot help but speculate that the glowing reviews it received are in part a reflection that the reviewers were writing about one of their own (the author is a prominent journalist). However, if you are interested in Adam Worth, there is no other book in print about him.

Written with dry British humor, the story of Adam Worth, master criminal, comes to life. And what a life it is! But. apparently, source material was rare and therefore only a few episodes of a criminal nature could be told. In toto, the author just repeats that Worth was a criminal and make sacks of money. To fill the book, he drags the Duchess of Devonshire around a bit too much. A comparison between her and her direct descendant, Lady Di, could be amusing. And I do hope they make the movie soon.

This book is such a fascinating read. The author not only details all of Worth's fascinating exploits and companions but gives the reader a fascinating glimpse into the underbelly of Victorian society. I will never read Sherlock Holmes (or see T.S. Eliot's McCavity Cat!) the same way again!

JOHN HENRY DAYS gives us John Henry, the icon, the mascot, the hero, the folktale, all wrapped up in this novel that bounces between Talcott, West Virginia for the U.S. Postal service release of the John Henry stamp and a number of times and place that show John Henry's importance in the fabric of America's history. Our protagonist in Talcott is J, a writer working on a non-stop jag of event after event, getting work from the omniscient List and living on free food and lodging, collecting receipts and rarely contemplating an empty existence. J's progression from this rather shallow being to a man who at least begins to question life's meaning is the main focus of the story. Too bad, it doesn't work. By the time J becomes interesting you just don't care enough about him. Whitehead creates such an emotional distance between the character and the reader that you really want to get back to the other stories contained within this novel.
The other stories are trips through America's past and John Henry's place in it, a bittersweet look at a young girl discovering the joy of discovering "The Ballad of John Henry" and how that doesn't fit in with view her mother has of a future member of the Sepia Ladies club of Harlem, a blues singer in Chicago cutting record sides and John Henry being his ticket to a few extra dollars, the destruction of Paul Robeson for not being what the American establishment wanted him to be; these are the stories that make this book worth reading. Best of all are Whitehead's takes on John Henry himself, the folktale comes to life as real human being.
Whitehead writes wonderful sentences. They are crafted beautifully and each seems to be placed with as much care as any master craftsman creating a work of art. The problem is that he spends too much time working with a creation that doesn't seem to warrant his attention. Read it for the beauty of its construction and the trips into the past, but the central plot left me cold.

They say laughter can extend your lifetime, if so, I'm going to live a long, long time as I laughed aloud over and over again when reading this book. Colson Whitehead has the sharpest sense of humour, and a knack for making perfect, sharp observations about people - their physial tics, their dress, their pretensions, their fears, their ambitions, their uncertainties. The journalists, Tiny and One Eye, were excrutiatingly funny, I reread some of the scenes in which they appeared, just to be sure I didn't miss a single barb. Whitehead knows how to convey something else rather piercingly too - loneliness. Pamela Street, a woman trying to decide what to do with the strange inheritance her father burdened her with (John Henry memorabilia, gathered obssessively, touchingly), reminded me of Lila Mae, the strong minded but deeply solitary woman in Whitehead's first book (called The Intuitionist, another stunning novel). And these are just a few of the secondary characters, I haven't even begun to describe the main guys, J. Sutter and the mythical (?) John Henry. And I'm not going to, this is a book that you just have to read for yourself, enjoy for yourself. And if you're anything like me, laugh while you're doing it.

Having read and loved Whitehead's first novel, I was waiting for his follow up with high hopes. All my expectations were met and surpassed by this extraordinary novel. John Henry Days is wideranging in its themes, characters, styles, you name it, clever as hell and ALWAYS funny. The journalist J., and the steel driving John Henry, couldn't be more different, yet Whitehead connects them in unexpected, thoughtful and often moving ways. I was mesmerised by this book, and there were some sections that, in the beauty and precision of their observation, could be read aloud as poetry. Now I can't wait to read his next book.

This book is interesting up to a point, and it contains some good anecdotes. But the author's almost touching need to prove that the Third Reich's admiration for Nietzsche was based solely on a combination of willful misreading and Elisabeth Nietzsche's influence leads him into all manner of logical quagmires.

At one point, he claims that Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" is "a concept intended to inspire but one which would develop sinister overtones in the wrong hands." This begs several questions: Whose are the right hands? How many people read--and believe-- Nietzsche without considering themselves to be at least larval supermen? Why should anyone be surprised when a philosopher who "rejected Christian morality and all other ideologies with moral imperatives," who claimed that "man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior," and who trumpeted the obligation of the self-styled strong to stamp out the "weak" is well received among brutal eugenicists with a lust for military power? I would think that a necessary competence for a career in philosophy would be to possess some slight awareness of the practical implications of one's ideas.

MacIntyre makes a convincing argument that Elisabeth Nietzsche was responsible for trying to pass her brother off as a rabid anti-Semite, but leaves one wondering precisely what benign effects Nietzsche's own drab and cruel political thought was supposed to have had on the world. Nietzsche would surely have rejected the notion that he was dealing in abstractions, so it seems disingenuous to treat his political notions as some form of Platonic ideal. MacIntyre's confusion is especially evident when, after praising Nietzsche for freeing mankind from the tyranny of false morality, he calls the Nazis "moral cripples"...beyond good and evil indeed!

A biography of Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth that would make good airplane reading. Partly that's because the bio is hung on a story, that of the author's trip to backwoods Paraguay to look for the colony she helped start.

I enjoyed this book because I found the story of Nueva Germania very interesting, although it turned out to be more of a biography of Elizabeth Nietzsche. I was expecting more on the actual inhabitants of Nueva Germania. I think it is still worth reading though because of its unique subject matter.