About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Dorothy Wickenden
Positive Booklist Wickenden brings three fascinating women to life in rich, humanizing detail, and shares how their \'insubordination\' against slavery and the oppression of women brought them together ... Wickenden pulls this history out of the dry dustiness of fact and adds color and warmth to its retelling. The women of our shared past deserve more treatments like this.
Jess Zimmerman
Positive Booklist While Zimmerman admits not to being a classicist or to offer an \'authentic\' interpretation of the monsters she discusses, their still-resonant images are excellent stand-ins for problems women still face today. Sometimes you need a reminder that Charybdis, while able to be survived, could not be defeated. For lovers of mythology and modern feminism, Zimmerman marries the two and gives us insight into how we can harness our power today.
Koa Beck
Rave Booklist Just in time for the hundredth anniversary of white women’s suffrage comes this masterful outlining of the progress and flaws of the feminist movement. Journalist, critic, and fiction writer Beck skillfully challenges the centralizing of white feminism ... Beck’s clearly laid-out examination and interrogation of white feminism will change the way readers think on a daily level. This new history is a timely call to action, and earns its place as required reading for anyone who claims to care about the future of feminism.
Deirdre Mask
Positive Booklist Mask’s globe-trotting examination of street addresses will have readers thinking more deeply about the logistics of where they are, where they’re going, and how they’re able to get there. This history of the street address is filled with anecdotes, history lessons, and thought-provoking benefits and drawbacks to a system most of us take for granted ... Mask leaves us with a greater appreciation of our efforts to find each other, and a peek into what the future may hold.
Cameron Esposito
Positive Booklist Esposito brings her distinctive and queer-focused brand of humor to the memoir, combining laugh-out-loud moments with somber reflections on gender, sexuality, religion, social power dynamics, and how to start the process of saving yourself ... this hilarious and emotional memoir charts Esposito’s growth personally, professionally, and spiritually. Those looking to learn more about this social justice-driven comedian will find the unflinching self-examination of a person ready to share something beyond her stand-up routine.
Adam Hochschild
Positive Booklist With the sure hand of an experienced guide, award-winning author Hochschild takes readers through the socialist circles of New York City in the Progressive Era ... Hochschild’s captivating and fast-paced biography is a true delight and an excellent addition to women’s history shelves.
Nicole Aschoff
Positive Booklist For readers who find themselves wondering about the pocket-sized smartphones that increasingly absorb our time, this in-depth examination of those ubiquitous machines and the roles they play in our everyday lives will shed some light ... She avoids a categorical moral judgment on our \'hand machines,\' as she frequently calls them, instead exploring the positive and negative ways they are used through essays that encourage readers to consider deeply what we frequently do on autopilot. How are smartphones made? Who mines the materials? How does that mining impact our environment? How much of our data do tech companies have access to, and why do we allow it? Aschoff considers these questions and more as she delves into the societal transformation we are all witness to, encouraging us all to be more deliberate, thoughtful, and aware of how we impact our phones and how they impact us.
Mary Beth Norton
Positive Booklist History is most certainly told by the winners, but contemporary newspaper accounts, letters, and sermons provide the narratives not told in our modern textbooks. The story of the Boston Tea Party, passed down throughout American history, is brought into the light as a multifaceted, controversial event. This laying out of detailed facts concerning everything from the aforementioned tea-dumping to the First Continental Congress encourages readers to question previous assumptions. Norton quotes firsthand accounts and draws on her long history of Loyalist scholarship to underline that what now seems an inevitable page in American history was not always so clear, and the past that we harken back to is sometimes all too similar to our present day.
Douglas R. Egerton
Positive Booklist Rather than focusing solely on the famed Adams men, Egerton paints fully realized portraits of the long-suffering Adams women in all their resiliency, tempestuousness, and oft-stifled brilliance. From John Quincy Adams to his more and more politically distanced descendants, the reader traces the hopeful continuation of John Adams’ work to the highly disappointing choices made by his great-grandchildren. Deeply researched and brimming with anecdotes, from this narrative emerges not only the decline and fall of the Adams family but also the political scene of the nineteenth century, the rise of modern America, and the unavoidable parallels with our own time as a nation that finds itself increasingly divided.
Marc Hamer
Positive Booklist This charming memoir of a rambler-turned-mole-catcher speaks of the small wonders found in nature, the interdependence of life, and a smattering of mole facts for the mole-curious ... Poems are scattered throughout the book for a dreamy ambience, which is juxtaposed with the ever-present existence of its subterranean subject. Lessons learned from a life outdoors encourage the reader to dwell in the small, mostly ordinary but sometimes extraordinary, moments that make up an existence. The reader discovers how to catch a mole, but will question: Should they be caught?
Cyrus Grace Dunham
Positive Booklist ... closer to an out-of-body experience than a memoir, something that makes all the more sense as [Dunham] repeats throughout that they do not feel comfortable in the body or self they have been born into ... Dreamlike and episodic, Dunham’s writing brings readers on a global tour of moments that have defined and remained with them. Their rambles seem destined towards a firm conclusion, only to stop short. By refusing a neat journey towards decision or realization, their memoir’s stopping point can be seen as one of two decisions: to stand at a crossroads, possibly knowing the direction you will go but keeping it close, or to take the typically unseen third path, which blends the two before you.
Sasha Chapin
Positive Booklist Parts travelogue, memoir, and collection of factoids, his first book takes readers from sweltering Thailand to the streets of St. Louis as he walks them through his consuming love affair with the game and offers up trivia about famous moves, renowned players, and a glance at its larger history ... Wryly funny, introspective, and grimly evocative, Chapin’s memoir is perfect for a brief wade into the world of chess, or as a jumping off point for a much deeper dive.