“Rich and enthralling . . . Paul Hendrickson is a deeply informed and inspired guide. He often appears in the first person, addressing the reader and exhorting him or her to speculate, imagine, or feel. He has researched exhaustively, been to the places Hemingway frequented, and talked to whoever was part of or had a connection to the Hemingway days. His diligence and spirit are remarkable. It is like traveling with an irrepressible talker who may go off on tangents but never loses the power to amaze. . . . Hemingway’s Boat is a book written with the virtuosity of a novelist, hagiographic in the right way, sympathetic, assiduous, and imaginative. It does not rival the biographies but rather stands brilliantly beside them-the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.””

“Large-minded [and] rigorously fair. . . . An indispensable document. . . . With this sterling summation of the entire Hemingway canon, Hendrickson shows what has eluded some very able scholars. A writer’s life can contain two conflicting existences, one of purely original genius and one of irreversible destructiveness. It’s a lucky genius who gets credit for the first and a free pass on the second. Hendrickson issues no free pass to Papa. He gives the ravaged old man something more honest: a fair summing-up of a life like no other.”

“Heartbreaking . . . Hemingway’s Boat includes some of the most moving, beautiful pieces of biography I have ever read. . . . In the best of these streaming ‘other lives’ . . . Hendrickson’s two strongest gifts-that compassion and his research and reporting prowess-combine to masterly effect.”

“A rich book and a wandering one. . . . Hemingway’s Boat is about Hemingway, about what was good in him and what was bad, about what brought a man who took pleasure in so much to the point where he could take his own life. It is about the joy he spread and the infection he carried. . . . For Hendrickson, discovering just how unhappy and unsettled Hemingway was for so long makes him more of a hero. He states his case persuasively, which is why this book is so good.”

“I read [Hemingway’s Boat] without a pause. . . . [It’s] a biography that is at once admiring and devastating, and full of material that I wouldn’t have thought even existed and of people who knew Hemingway whom I’d never heard of-an eye opener of a book, full of unexpected riches, fascinating digressions, and leaving one at the end wishing the book were longer, and thinking long and hard about the price of fame and success in America, and the dangers of seemingly getting everything you wanted out of life-it just may be the best book I’ve read this year, and certainly the best book I’ve read about an American writer in a long, long time.”

“Writing with stylistic verve, great heart and profound insight, Paul Hendrickson gives us a fresh way to understand one of the most written-about, fascinating characters in American letters. . . . Hendrickson doesn’t reveal Hemingway’s life as much as he illuminates it with his characteristic passion and intelligence, in a great match of biographer and subject.”