About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Abraham Verghese
Mixed The New York Times Book Review \"It is tempting to look at him as a man with multiple careers running in tandem, but all his work is anchored in a consistent, profound moral architecture of the spirit ... His new nove focuses almost entirely on good people (to whom many terrible things happen), and given the complexity of human beings, the surfeit of grace sometimes feels unrealistic and even pretentious, as though the writer is affiliating himself with standards that ordinary humans cannot attain ... It is, however, grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing. Verghese has a gift for suspense, and his easy relationship to language draws you through the narrative so effortlessly that you hardly realize you are plowing through decade upon decade and page upon page ... Verghese’s writing about all things medical is particularly adroit; his profound understanding of the human body is perhaps his greatest strength ... This is populist writing, ambitious in plot but not in character, and populated with archetypes rather than people. So, in many ways, was the work of Charles Dickens, whose crackling but now rather historical method of storytelling may be among Verghese’s inspirations.\
Meghan O'Rourke
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... a profound, sometimes lyrical, deeply moving portrayal of a vague constellation of illnesses ... She steers ably between the Scylla of cynicism and the Charybdis of romanticism, achieving an authentically original voice and, perhaps more startlingly, an authentically original perspective. A poet by choice and an interpreter of medical doctrine by necessity, she brings an elegant discipline to her description of a horrific decade lost to overdetermined symptoms that were misdiagnosed or dismissed as hypochondria. O’Rourke is not afraid to plumb the depth of her affliction; there are no niceties about starving children in the developing world who have it worse, though she does nod to less advantaged populations for whom conditions such as hers invite medical neglect and occasion bankruptcy. The book reads in part like a good mystery: She alludes to being better from the start, but we are constantly guessing which doctor or intervention made the decisive difference ... The book is not only a memoir of her illness, but also a document of years of research, some of it for this book, but much of it simply to preserve her sanity ... Her book has very little celebration in it, but it is a triumphant document of her refusal to be unseen, her ongoing dedication to cogency ... O’Rourke exposes the ways illness coincides with time to undermine identity ... Her book can be humorless to the point of self-pity, and sometimes this becomes tiresome; even the dying can find grace in some levity sprinkled through their narratives of decay. Indeed, hilarity is often the tool by which intimacy with the reader is achieved. But O’Rourke seems to be above such pandering. What she endured wasn’t funny; it is the occasion neither of wit nor of exuberance. For all its visceral force, her prose is literal, urgent, packed into the tight container of a single book about multiple sicknesses and disappointments and losses. In this era when we understand so much, we still fall short on chronic illness, autoimmune disorders, disruptions of the microbiome, the lasting effects of Lyme, long Covid and a variety of other such complaints. She refuses to sugarcoat the reality she has endured ... The book will be helpful to people in O’Rourke’s position: those who are suffering with confusing, unexplained illnesses. It is likewise a commentary on medicine as it exists today, puncturing our fantasy that diagnosticians can reliably make clear diagnoses, that the course of treatment upon diagnosis is usually clear and specific, that medicine is straightforward and that bodily ills can be targeted. O’Rourke is not blithely holistic in the New Agey, potpourri way of so much amateur writing about illness. But she does entertain the idea that there is insight beyond what is delivered by the men in white coats who populate the corridors of American hospitals, and then chaos beyond that insight. While her full diagnosis is never clear, her writing consistently is.
Katie Booth
Positive The New York Times Book Review Booth’s biography of Bell has been in the works for 15 years; her meticulous research and rigor are evident on every page. Engagingly written, the book enlivens a life that has often appeared dry in other accounts. Booth’s descriptions of Bell’s passionate courtship of his student Mabel Hubbard, who belonged to a much higher social class, are as stirring as a romance novel, and her narrative of his work on the telephone reads like a thriller. One comes away feeling deeply connected not only to Bell, but also to Mabel and a host of subsidiary characters ... Booth is doubly outraged: at what Bell wanted to do and at the psychic cost of the method by which he proposed to do it. Her book is a partisan rallying cry fueled in part by her experience of having two deaf grandparents ... Everything Booth says in this eloquent biography is backed up persuasively, but her yearning to correct the record should be balanced against the uncorrected record that has obtained previously. Though she attempts to wave the flag of impartiality, she is deeply invested in indicting her subject ... Bell’s wish that everyone understand everyone else came at a terrible price, but it was the product of its time. Booth’s anger reflects a current trend of holding people from the past to standards of the present.
Oliver Sacks
Positive The New York Times Book Review He does not play down the anger of some patients who have felt betrayed by his portrayals of them, nor does he deny his frustration with wary ones who resisted being depicted ... this memoir is more a history of his career than an analysis of it ... With On the Move, he has finally presented himself as he has presented others: as both fully vulnerable and an object of curiosity ... The most attractive and most problematic qualities of his writing turn out to be what are best and worst in him. His immersion in his patients’ brokenness is mirrored here in his acknowledgment of his own brokenness, his belated empathy for his younger self ... The primary mark of a good memoir is that it makes you nostalgic for experiences you never had, and Sacks captures the electrifying discoveries he made, especially those in his early career, with vivid, hard-edge prose ... Sacks assumes sometimes that we know more of his past than we do, and sometimes that we know less. Parts of this undertaking read dismayingly like the book one might write for one’s grandchildren ... His writing sometimes has a tinge of exposé, and there is no evidence that his clinical skills outrank those of other neurologists. To dismiss him on either of these fronts, however, misses the central fact that translating between those two arenas has great value of its own.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Positive The New York Times Book Review While [Williams\'] Self-Portrait in Black and White begins with assertions of his blackness, it evolves into a rich set of questions occasioned by the birth of his first child ... He rejects the anger endemic to so much current writing about race in America; he is refreshingly free of the punishing though brilliant invective of Ta-Nehisi Coates ... On the whole, Williams’s book is more rigorous than mournful, an account of solutions more than of problems, marked by self-deprecating humor and acute sensitivity ... Williams writes beautifully, but his pages include quotations from great men that sometimes seem like scattered proof of his sophistication, a reflection of insecurities he disavows. Some readers will find his rhetoric perfidious and reactionary, with its dismissal of identity politics and the concomitant particulars of the African-American experience. But he is so honest and fresh in his observations, so skillful at blending his own story with larger principles, that it is hard not to admire him. At a time of increasing division, his philosophizing evinces an underlying generosity. He reaches both ways across the aisle of racism, arguing above all for reciprocity, and in doing so begins to theorize the temperate peace of which all humanity is sorely in need.
Ian Buruma
Positive The New York Times Book Review It is a triumphal narrative of how determination, charm, readiness and linguistic fluency allowed the author to penetrate one of the world’s most insular societies, beginning as an enthusiast for the country’s avant-garde culture and ultimately becoming part of that culture ... There is a touch of the erotic throughout his exegesis, but there is also a feeling of linguistic and cultural diligence, of the author’s effort to learn this new place ... he treats his old self with a sort of avuncular geniality, as though to say, 'Yes, we are foolish when we are young, but oh, how lovely it all was.'
Daphne Merkin
Positive The New York Times Book Review In the earlier part of her memoir, her tight focus on her own story at the expense of anyone else’s can come off as self-indulgent, even self-aggrandizing, but it is part of her considerable art that by the end, it feels like a winning frankness. The reader is saved from diaristic fatigue by the sharpness of her observations ... she narrates what happened and how it felt to her. And she does so with insight, grace and excruciating clarity, in exquisite and sometimes darkly humorous prose. The same tinge of self-aware narcissism that makes the book at times so annoying makes it finally triumphant. Merkin is unlikely to cheer you up, but if your misery loves company, you will find no better companion. This is not a how-to-get-better book, but we hardly need another one of those; it is a how-to-be-desolate book, which is an altogether more crucial manual ... it is standard fare to say that books on depression are brave, but this one actually is. For all its highly personal focus, it is an important addition to the literature of mental illness.
David Oshinsky
Mixed The Washington Post ...a meticulous, if somewhat too narrowly focused, history ... Oshinsky writes with particular vigor of Bellevue’s refusal to subscribe to popular prejudices, noting that the hospital welcomed Jewish doctors as well as Christian ones, female doctors as well as male ones, and African American staff ... Oshinsky’s greatest strength may be his capacity for admiration. But seldom do we really get to know these people; they appear in vignettes ... Bellevue is curiously lacking in emotional punch, expressing an almost hagiographic veneration for the very real accomplishments of the hospital, its doctors and its programs, but without deeply moving the reader ... his narrative of Bellevue feels admirable but limited.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Positive The Washington Post The Gene has its own elegant, twisting structure, in which evidence is suspended between the spines of history and science. It never pretends to ingenuousness; indeed, one is often tempted to give the author an A for visible effort. But with a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it.