"In a just world," wrote Mark Lasswell in a review of the book for "The Wall Street Journal", "Matt Labash would be celebrated as the heir to Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and other writers in the 1960s and 1970s who were corralled under the rubric of 'new journalism'...Like the best of the new-journalism practitioners, Mr. Labash inhabits a story so thoroughly that readers feel as if they're at his side, seeing events with his sharp eye, privy to his wisecracks, savoring moments when he reels in what feels like the truth." Lasswell noted that "Labash specializes in going after catfish of the human variety: the unpopular, the no-hopers, the has-beens and the rogues." While Labash "doesn't pull his punches" in such pieces as his profile of former Washington mayor Marion Barry, "he succeeds in producing an affecting portrait of a rapscallion in twilight... the deep satisfaction of finishing a story and feeling that it couldn't have been told better."