A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

George Scialabba reviews a biography of Ignazio Silone, an Italian Communist who became disillusioned by Stalin’s influence on the movement. Scialabba calls the new book “excellent,” and believes that Silone’s work is still important because of his “unusual combination of earnestness and skepticism, of lofty idealism and earthy humor. [. . .] Even among the minority of intellectuals who tried to maintain a critical distance from both sides, everyone lost his balance at one time or another — but Silone less often than most.” . . . Dan Baum calls Dave Eggers’ latest “as accurate, sensual and readable an account of Hurricane Katrina as you can find in nonfiction,” though he seems to underplay his own concerns about the book’s research near the end of the review. . . . Brad Jones reviews the new biography of Satchel Paige, a “wonderful, loving portrait of a gigantic figure.” . . . I might be more interested in Peter Kilborn’s Next Stop, Reloville than most, because my family moved from Long Island to Plano, Texas, when I was 14. The book deals with just those kinds of relocations. In the Wall Street Journal, Joel Kotkin says the book has an “appealingly sensible outlook” but “lacks both the statistical rigor and deep historical perspective found in the best such works.”