1/ Brad Buch­holz, writ­ing in the Austin American-​Statesman, August 6, 2007:

Robert Bly is the Great Elder of Amer­i­can poetry — a voice of con­science, of vul­ner­a­bil­ity, of curi­ousity [sic].

2/ Eliot Wein­berger, writ­ing in The Nation, Novem­ber 17, 1979:

Robert Bly is a wind­bag, a sen­ti­men­tal­ist, a slob in the language.

This week­end the New York Times Book Review finally gets around to review­ing Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. (You can read it now here.)

Julia Reed, the reviewer, likes the book, but it takes half the review before she’ll admit it. First she has to work her way through famil­iar com­plaints about Dillard’s vocab­u­lary and the by now com­mon­place quo­ta­tion from Eudora Welty’s 1975 Pil­grim at Tinker Creek review. But Reed gets there, grudg­ingly, even­tu­ally call­ing the book “a near great one.”

Desi Arnaz was a class­mate of Fidel Castro’s at the Cole­gio de Dolores, where the Jesuit teach­ers told their stu­dents to “ask every­body every­thing every day” and rec­om­mended “a min­i­mum of pre­cept, a max­i­mum of practice.” Patrick Symmes’s new book The Boys from Dolores catches up with Castro’s class­mates four decades after the Rev­o­lu­tion. Check out the reviews at The New York Times and The Wash­ing­ton Post and then buy the book.

Mar­i­lynne Robinson’s review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees gets the cover of this week’s Wash­ing­ton Post Book World. The Post also fea­tures a funny inter­view of Dil­lard by Daniel Asa Rose. For more reviews of the novel, click here.