Boston Globe: “Early on in his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, critic, essayist, and reformed novelist David Shields compares himself to George W. Bush…”

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2013:

Anyone who gives a hoot about the status and the future of storytelling needs this rangy, brainy, bad-ass book–a book that celebrates books, dissects books, and pays homage to the creators of our stories. Packed with riffs and rants–some hilarious, some brilliant, some flat-out zany–this is caffeinated, mad-genius stuff: sly, manic, thoughtful, and witty. (Shields’ three-page self-comparison to George W. Bush–”he likes to watch football and eat pretzels”–is especially fun.) At times, I felt like I was on a madcap tour of an eccentric professor’s private basement library, never knowing what was around the next corner. My review copy is littered with underlines and exclamation points and, yes, a handful of WTFs. Part critical analysis, part essay, and part memoir, How Literature Saved My Life offers its liveliest passages when Shields reveals Shields. A stutterer, he developed an early kinship with the written word, since the spoken word came to him with “dehumanizing” difficulty. Which makes one of his final lines all the more potent: “Language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn’t, not quite.”–Neal Thompson