This page lists the known reviews of Don DeLillo's 1991 novel, Mao II.
Chicago Tribune Book World: June 23, 1991 - review of Mao II by Jerome Klinkowitz.
Commonweal: August 9, 1991 - review of Mao II by Mark Feeney.
Globe and Mail (Toronto): June 22, 1991 - "The curator of menace" review of Mao II by Don Gillmor.
Guardian (Manchester): August 29, 1991 - "The face in the crowd" review of Mao II by James Wood, p. 22.
The Independent (U.K.): September 8, 1991 - "Thoroughly Post-Modern Millenium" review of Mao II by Martin Amis, Sunday Review p. 28.
Los Angeles Times Book Review: June 9, 1991 - "Hermetically Seared" review of Mao II by Richard Eder.
Newsweek: June 3, 1991 - short review of Mao II by Malcolm Jones Jr, p. 61.
New Yorker: June 24, 1991 - "Market Report" review of Mao II by Louis Menand, pp. 81-84.
New York Review of Books: June 27, 1991 - review of Mao II by Robert Towers, p. 18.
New York Times: May 28, 1991 - "Fighting Against Envelopment by the Mass Mind" review of Mao II by Michiko Kakutani.
New York Times Book Review: June 9, 1991 - "Look for a Writer and Find a Terrorist" review of Mao II by Lorrie Moore.
As with so much of Mr. DeLillo's work, the novel has a discursive sweep, and its narrative movement from serious idea to serious idea is rigorously un-neat, like the gathering and associative movement of the brain itself. But as a story about a reclusive writer, written by a reclusive writer, it has a sense of humor. Early on in the novel, a mad street person, "great-maned and filthy, rimed saliva in his beard, old bruises across the forehead gone soft and crumbly," bursts into a bookstore; "I'm here to sign my books," he tells the security guard. Later, when the protagonist, a novelist named Bill Gray, falls into the company of a Maoist terrorist sympathizer, their tense conversation takes an unexpected turn: "There's something I wanted to ask the other evening at dinner," says the other man. "Do you use a word processor?"
San Francisco Chronicle: June 9, 1991 - "DeLillo's Elegy to Language" review of Mao II by Paul Skenazy.
Time: June 10, 1991 - "Men Who Work Underground" review of Mao II by Paul Gray, p. 68.
Sunday Times (London): September 8, 1991 - "Meaningful relationships" review of Mao II by Anthony Clare, p. 6-7.
Times Literary Supplement (London): August 30, 1991 - "Shaping up to catastrophe" review of Mao II by Julian Loose, pp. 20-21.
Village Voice: June 18, 1991 - "Mao, Voyager" review of Mao II by Richard Gehr.
Washington Post Book World: May 26, 1991 - "The Future Belongs to Crowds" review of Mao II by Sven Birkerts.