Lauren Redniss

Brilliant...astonishing...arrestingly beautiful...establishes Redniss as a master storyteller of a new order.

Redniss has a flair for weaving deep reporting and visual storytelling into immersive and engrossing nonfiction.

Redniss creates books like no one else’s. . . Oak Flat is a fervent and beautiful argument. . . . It is, one might hope, proof of art’s purpose: to expand minds, to promote beauty, and to make change.

In the world of arts and letters, there isn’t anyone quite like Lauren Redniss....Reading her work is like poring over the notebooks of a hyper-literate, hyper-curious, and slightly mad artist.

In Oak Flat, Lauren Redniss has produced a supernova: a dazzling blend of deep reporting, sublime artwork, haunting dialogue, and descriptive writing that has the crystalline precision of a prose poem. In conveying the story of the ongoing clash over a patch of southeastern Arizona—site of priceless copper deposits, but also sacred Apache land—Redniss weaves together physics, history, geology, legislative chicanery, intimate portraiture, and tribal custom and culture into a vivid, searing, indelible act of witness.

Oak Flat left me stunned. History, testimony, art, landscape: Lauren Redniss weaves these elements together to evoke the rock and sand and sky of the Arizona desert, and to bring to life the story of the people for whom that land is sacred. Rarely is a book simultaneously so heartfelt and so brilliant.

Lauren Redniss’s Oak Flat unfolds and unfolds, moving swiftly and seamlessly from the cosmological to the geological to the intimate regions of the human heart. It tackles a painful, important subject with grace, rendering everyone and everything it investigates with uncommon intimacy, curiosity, and dignity.

Blending journalism, politics, poetry, and art is a literary high-wire act. Lauren Redniss is one of the few artists who can do it. Oak Flat is a bewitching and mesmerizing book.

A vital read and a staggering work of art.

Gorgeous, devastating, and hopeful . . . Redniss’s glowing colored-pencil illustrations capture the surreal magic of Southwestern landscapes: from a green-eyed ocelot, to the nearly empty Main Street in Superior. The future of Oak Flat and other sacred sites remains precarious, but Redniss effectively conveys the importance of these grounds and delivers a respectful and powerful portrait of people who are down but refuse to be counted out.

Artistically and thematically profound . . . [Redniss] has a scope that extends well beyond the conventional limits of the graphic novel. Here, she frames her provocative narrative with artistry that evokes the awe and wonder of Native origin stories and the timelessness of eternity. . . . As a work of advocacy, the book is compelling and convincing; as a work of art, it is masterful.

Redniss’ achievement is a celebration of the essential power of books to inform, charm, and transport. In marrying the graphic and visual arts with biography and cultural history, she has expanded the realm of non-fiction.

[Radioactive] is a deeply unusual and forceful thing to have in your hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long, literate and supple. The electricity…derives from the friction between Ms. Redniss’s text and her ambitious and spooky art. …Radioactive is serious science and brisk storytelling. The word ‘luminous’ is a critic’s cliché, to be avoided at all costs, but it fits Ms. Redniss’s book pretty snugly.

Sheer imaginative genius.

Stunningly beautiful…Radioactive is a rare cross-pollination of art and science, the kind of storytelling that makes us care about stories.

Radioactive offer innumerable wonders. Colors suddenly bloom into tremendous feeling, history contracts into a pair of elongated figures locked in an embrace, then expands again in an explosive rush of words. In this wholly original book about passion and discovery Lauren Redniss has invented her own unique form.

One of the most beautiful books-as-object that I’ve ever seen.

In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells these personal stories, which illustrate the magic and mystery of our weather. Then she illustrates those stories with vivid artwork in this big, beautiful book… Redniss has taken the graphic novel form and tilted it to the demands of nonfiction.

21st Century Genius...Redniss has been credited with inventing a new literary genre.

Magical…This is what Redniss has done, too: shown us how human beings live with nature.

A gorgeous and illuminating illustrated study of weather in all its tempestuous variety…Redniss’s combo of fact, folklore, and vibrant etched copperplate prints enthralls

Lauren Redniss’s Thunder & Lightning is such a strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent. It’s the way you wish science would always be taught—with a mix of stories and facts, legend and hard science.”

In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads. This is an illuminated book that is also an illuminating one.

Lauren Redniss is one of the most creative science writers of our time—her combination of beautiful artwork, reporting, and poetic prose brings science to life in ways that words alone simply cannot. Thunder & Lighting is a fascinating meditation on how climate affects the earth’s landscape and the lives inhabiting it, but also how the landscape of a book—the layout of its text, the images on its pages—impacts the telling of a story. This is an important book about a topic that couldn’t be more important to us all.