New York Times Includes Two Bennington Faculty Members on Notable Books List

The New York Times Book Review, in its just released 100 Most Notable Books of the Year, features two Bennington College faculty members—literature faculty member Steven Bach’s biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl and MFA faculty member, Tom Bissell’s memoir, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam.

Bach’s Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, published by Knopf, has been no stranger to critical acclaim. In March, Leni was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and later reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, which proclaimed that “It is difficult to over praise Bach's efforts...Bach is determined to present [Leni Riefenstahl] coolly, ironically, without loss of his own moral vector. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work...an almost novelistically compelling narrative of a life endlessly obfuscated by lies...graceful...nuanced...brilliant."

MFA Writing Seminars faculty member, Tom Bissell’s The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam published by Random House, has garnered sensational reviews from critics across the country, as well as honored with a 2007 Quill Award. The Los Angeles Times writes “Tom Bissell is superb. His descriptions of today’s Vietnam are breathtaking and deep, written with a novelist’s flair of giving life to the inanimate and the obscure.” The New York Times Book Review praised Bissell, in March, for bringing a “luminous prose style and, perhaps more important, a clear, fresh eye to events that many of us have allowed to slip into the infuriatingly painful past.”

For the complete list of notables, published on December 2, 2007 in the New York Times Book Review, click here.

To purchase Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl click here.

To purchase The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam click here.