Hemingway's most deeply autobiographical piece of work
Irish Times
Hemingway’s style is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality
Guardian
Many of the episodes contain the most exciting and effective writing Hemingway has ever done
Saturday Review
This book contains some of the best of Hemingway's descriptions of nature: the waves breaking white and green on the reef off the coast of Cuba; the beauty of the morning on the deep water; the hermit crabs and land crabs and ghost crabs; a big barracuda stalking mullet; a heron flying with his white wings over the green water; the ibis and flamingoes and spoonbills, the last of these beautiful with the sharp rose of their color; the mosquitoes in clouds from the marshes; the water that curled and blew under the lash of the wind; the sculpture that the wind and sand had made of a piece of driftwood, gray and sanded and embedded in white, floury sand
- Edmund Wilson, Saturday Review
Thomas Hudson, the painter in the book <i>Islands in the Stream</i>is Hemingway himself, attempting to come to terms with everything he loves - the clarity of a brushstroke, his three children, his ex-wives, his lovers, his whores, his friends, his cats, his rifle, his Booth's gin
Newsweek