Criticising an influential and much-admired writer as Hannah Arendt raised controversy. An editor of "The New York Times Book Review", Barry Gewen, while praising the "factual density" in Cesarani's book, dismissed what he described as Cesarani's "hostility" to Arendt and even suggested that Cesarani needed to "tear Arendt down to make space for himself." He further said that "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments." He characterised Cesarani's statement, "She had much in common with Eichmann. There were two people in the courtroom who looked up to the German-born judges as the best of Germany and looked down on the prosecutor as a miserable Ostjude: one was Eichmann and the other was Hannah Arendt," as a "slur" which "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."