In his book Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007), Clive James admired Kovály's "psychological penetration and terse style" and stated: “Given 30 seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century, I would choose this one."
In their book Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century (2012) Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder recommend Under a Cruel Star.[3]
Writing for The New York Times, Anthony Lewis said: "Once in a while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our time and ourselves in perspective, making us confront the darker realities of human nature."
San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner called Kovály's memoir "a story of human spirit at its most indomitable … one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century."
Josef Škvorecký, a fellow Czech writer and expatriate, stated that the book was "written with the sophistication of a litterateur and the immediacy of a survivor."