About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lucas Mann
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books Parenthood in general, and modern fatherhood in particular, proves to be an ideal subject for Mann’s approach. The strange mix of self-deprecation and self-congratulation produces a figure of humor and even pathos ... I loved Attachments. It made me feel, as they say, seen ... Yet I also detected a reticence within the book. Mann recognizes how much the narrow frame of the Bad Dad Joke leaves out, while also acknowledging how tempting, even comforting, it is to contort oneself to fit into it, to live down to expectations, to reduce one’s heartache to a punny punch line, even when one knows better.
Jeff Sharlet
Rave The Washington Post A travelogue that tarries with furious people in forgotten places, all of them convinced that civil war of some sort is in the offing ... To put it in religious terms, one could say he’s turned his attention from the pulpit to the congregation ... If The Undertow lacks anything, it’s a sense of the grim economic landscape ... But that’s a minor quibble. I deeply appreciate Sharlet’s mythic-religious approach and how it enables him to capture what other journalists miss.
Jeff Jackson
Positive The Millions This is no nostalgia trip. You won’t find wistful odes to the scene of the author’s youth. Instead you’ll find violence and contagion leaping from scene to scene, leaving real bodies in its real wake. ... at a moment when the narratives that define our daily lives can seem inflexibly constricting, [Destroy All Monsters sounds downright hopeful.
John Nixon
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Among this growing genre [of Iraq War books], John Nixon’s Debriefing the President is nearly unique, resembling nothing so much as a workplace comedy. Forget American Sniper or Zero Dark Thirty — the nearest analogue to Nixon’s story of meetings going nowhere and supervisors talking past each other may very well be The Office ... The portrait Nixon sketches here is fascinating, offering details that have been misrepresented or completely missed elsewhere ... Bush proves himself again and again to have little interest in the nuances and subtleties that constitute foreign policy. If it’s not cut and dry, he’s not interested. This worldview has been well documented, but Nixon has the unique perspective of one who has sat in rooms with George W. Bush and his avowed enemy.
Pankaj Mishra
Positive The Los Angeles Review of Books Reading Age of Anger, Trump and his ilk across the globe seem like a combination of the worst aspects of these two figures. Remove all the intellect from Voltaire until you have nothing but the bourgeois businessman, combine it with Rousseau’s penchant for feeling slighted by every aspect of human existence, and you have a Frankenstein’s monster who doesn’t frighten the torch-carrying villagers, but leads them on a rampage to raze everything in sight ... If there is a weakness to Age of Anger, it’s that Mishra only glances at the events of the 20th century as he tracks the course of anti-modern reaction.
Roy Scranton
Positive The Millions Ignorant American man-children wreaking havoc both at home and abroad: is this all War Porn is? Not at all, thankfully. Nestled in the book’s center is a kind of novella about an Iraqi professor named Qasim. He’s a genuine character, torn between professional and personal responsibility. His thread is by far the most humane part of the book, and this seems by design. After dismantling those homefront and combat tropes, Scranton maps out this new path into the subject ... It’s a different kind of Iraq War novel, for sure, but it’s not just that. It’s an expression of Scranton’s philosophy about telling new, different stories as a means of survival.