“Kevin Birmingham’s new book about the long censorship fight over James Joyce’s Ulysses braids eight or nine good stories into one mighty strand… The best story that’s told… may be that of the arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer. Mr. Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, appears fully formed in this, his first book. The historian and the writer in him are utterly in sync. He marches through this material with authority and grace, an instinct for detail and smacking quotation and a fair amount of wit. It’s a measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“So it is all the more impressive that this young Harvard Ph.D. in English has written a grand, readable adventure story about the novel’s legal troubles… Birmingham spent years sifting through archives. It shows. He has read Ulysses deeply, borrowing its organizing principles, telescoping some moments, amplifying others, jumping from character to character, continent to continent, subject to subject, text analysis to literary history. This all makes The Most Dangerous Book dynamic.” —Rachel Shteir, The New York Times Book Review
“Birmingham has produced an excellent work of consolidation…. [A] lively history …. The Most Dangerous Book is impressively researched and especially useful for its meticulous accounts of various legal battles. It is meant to be fun to read and, setting aside my fogeyish cavils, it is.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“[G]ripping. Like the novel which it takes as its subject, it deserves to be read.” —The Economist
“Terrific…. The Most Dangerous Book is the fullest account anybody has made of the publication history of Ulysses. Birmingham’s brilliant study makes you realize how important owning this book, the physical book, has always been to people.” —The New Yorker
“Birmingham recounts this story with a richness of detail and dramatic verve unexpected of literary history, making one almost nostalgic for the bad old days, when a book could be still be dangerous.” —Vanity Fair
“The story of Ulysses has been told before, but not with Mr. Birmingham’s thoroughness. The Most Dangerous Book makes use of newspaper reports, court documents, letters and the existing Joyce biographies. It looks back to a time ‘when novelists tested the limits of the law and when novels were dangerous enough to be burned’ and makes one almost nostalgic for it.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written about Ulysses since its publication. Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book is a splendid addition…. this book has groundbreaking new archival research, and it thrills like a courtroom drama.” —Dallas Morning News
“I am not a Joycean. But I loved Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book anyway. You don’t need to be a Bloomsday devotee to enjoy or profit mightily from it. Birmingham… writes with fluidity and a surprising eye for fun. He probably has read through the mountains of books and scholarly articles on Ulysses and seems obsessed with the book itself, but wears it all lightly. [A] vivid narrative [that]…makes you want to go back and read—and treasure—Joyce’s novel because he liberally salts the novel’s backstory with memorable anecdotes and apercus, especially at the close of each chapter.” —Boston Globe
“Lively and engrossing.” —Houston Chronicle
“[A] deeply fun work of scholarship that rescues Ulysses from the superlatives and academic battles that shroud its fundamental unruliness and humanity.” —Slate
“Astute and gorgeously written…. [The] battle for Ulysses…is a story that, as Birmingham puts it, forced the world to ‘recognize that beauty is deeper than pleasure and that art is larger than beauty.’ He has done it justice.” —Salon
“An essential, thoroughly researched addition to Joyceana and a consistently engaging narrative of how sexuality, aesthetics, morality, and jurisprudence collided almost a century ago.” —Chronicle of Higher Education
“Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses casts its nets… widely, synthesizing enormous amounts of information and describing in detail the multiple circumstances surrounding the gestation, publication and suppression of Ulysses. Birmingham is a fluid writer, and the more intricate the detail, the more compelling the narrative he constructs: his account of the rise of American obscenity laws… is as gripping to read as his account of the barbaric eye surgeries Joyce endured or his account of the nearly slapstick manner in which Samuel Roth published a pirated edition of Ulysses in 1929.” —The Nation
“In this exultant literary history and nonfiction debut, Harvard lecturer Birmingham recounts the remarkable publication saga of Ulysses, often considered the greatest novel of the 20th century…Drawing upon extensive research, Birmingham skillfully converts the dust of the archive into vivid narrative, steeping readers in the culture, law, and art of a world forced to contend with a masterpiece.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred)
“[A] sharp, well-written debut….Birmingham makes palpable the courage and commitment of the rebels who championed Joyce, but he grants the censors their points of view as well in this absorbing chronicle of a tumultuous time. Superb cultural history, pulling together many strands of literary, judicial and societal developments into a smoothly woven narrative fabric.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“What begins as simply the ‘biography of a book’ morphs into an absorbing, deeply researched, and accessible guide to the history of modern thought in the first two decades of the 20th century through the lens of Joyce’s innovative fiction.” —Library Journal
“Birmingham delivers for the first time a complete account of the legal war waged…to get Joyce’s masterpiece past British and American obscenity laws. Birmingham has chronicled an epoch-making triumph for literature.” —Booklist
“The Most Dangerous Book is riveting narrative nonfiction, populated with enough real larger-than-life characters and twists to make a fiction writer envious. Through Kevin Birmingham’s masterful voice and impeccable research, this story of a singular book that changed the world proves in dramatic fashion that the history of literature is not a landscape but a battlefield.” —Matthew Pearl, New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club
“A great story—how modernism brought down the regime of censorship—told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham’s imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page.” —Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club
“The story of the sufferings of James Joyce’s Ulysses under government censorship and obscenity laws has never been better told than by Kevin Birmingham in this eloquent, deeply researched book. Birmingham takes readers on a vivid journey through the conditions that shackled and, ultimately, liberated Joyce’s masterpiece. Combining fluent narrative and fresh discovery, this book brings to life a lost world of little magazines, literary patronage, postal and customs laws, vice society raids, and courtroom heroics.” —Robert Spoo, author of Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain
“A superb work of scholarship and recounting that goes far beyond literary assessment, Birmingham’s minutely researched investigation also grows into an inspiring diary of courage in the face of oppression. The detail, the vast anguish of a great artist, the defiance that truth can incite, the ruguery and the cunning on both sides, the hypocrisy of moral bullies—every page submits an argument for the bravery of those believe in art above all. Dense and exciting, populated with heroes, heroines and villainous government, it’s full of warnings as to where we were as a culture—and what we could become again if our vigilance flags. A wonderfully eye-opening read, The Most Dangerous Book stands beside Richard Ellmann’s defining biography in the great and moving understandings of James Joyce and his epic life.” —Frank Delaney, author of Ireland and Re: Joyce
