Reviews for MaxNotes: Animal Farm

The average rating for MaxNotes: Animal Farm based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-28 00:00:00 Terry Cavan Some of it's amazing and Marcus is an impressive writer, but this one is a bit too rambling, overlong and very repetitive.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-29 00:00:00 Eric West If something can feel incomplete and still be a bit genius, this book is it. Its difficult to follow the imaginative threads that Marcus makes for American democracy and pop culture. Avant grade music, Philip Roth books, David Lynch films, Alan Ginsburg's poetry, an obscure graphic novel about Uncle Sam, are used by Marcus as examples of American exceptionalism. An exceptionalism, he notes best exemplified by American artists and not politicians. Some essays are easier to read than others, but on the whole if you appreciate but don't care this much about Philip Roth or David Lynch (like myself), it makes for even more strained reading. At its best, his writing style has a stream of consciousness brilliance about it (particularly in the last essay). At its worst, it feels like he's pulling from all sorts of sources to make a vaguely interesting thesis about American potential somewhat plausible.