About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Lisa Wells
Positive High Country News Believers is digressive and its scope broad, the book’s many threads tied by Wells’ appraisal of environmental damage and repair. She’s largely successful in this intertwining, although some storylines are better executed than others. A chapter that fluctuates between a reconciliation ceremony in Taos, New Mexico, and a mental breakdown on a trip to Philadelphia feels off-kilter. (Sometimes, the language itself feels circular; while reading, I underlined a sentence that struck me. When the same sentence appeared 10 pages later, its repetition felt more accidental than intentional.) Still, Wells’ prose, rooted in her poetry, gives her a unique advantage when writing about living through this unstable moment in history ... Some of Believers\' best moments involve Wells digging into the cultural delusions of the frontier ... There are times when Wells appears uncomfortable as a memoirist—reticent about some difficult portions of her life—but, like the subjects she profiles, her memories ground Believers\' big questions in personal stakes.
Eric Dean Wilson
Positive The Baffler While it may not be a surprise to learn that Euro-American standards of comfort have been largely dictated by rich and sweaty white men, how exactly this standard was set makes for a fascinating narrative of technological innovation and environmental destruction ... The story of how scientists detected the danger of CFCs and how the transition away from the ubiquitous chemical has played out is one of After Cooling’s most complex and riveting narratives. It’s also where the book begins to closely connect with the present, revealing how we may have averted one crisis, but steered directly into another ... [Wilson\'s] writing is thoughtful and informed by an eclectic mix of research, including scientific articles, environmental reporting, American history, critical theory, television, and science fiction.
Fatima Shaik
Positive The Christian Science Monitor ... intriguing ... Shaik painstakingly recounts Economie meetings, translating the society’s minutes from the original French. While the author’s fidelity to her primary source material is commendable, it does result in some passages being overloaded with specifics that feel insignificant relative to the book’s larger narrative arc. Ultimately Shaik is most successful when placing the Economie’s chronology within a broader context.
Jana Larson
Positive The Star Tribune Fittingly, Larson softens the divisions separating genres by interweaving memoir, travelogue and screenplay. While unconventional, it works, and the result is a cleverly aberrant narrative structure dealing with the creative process and the difficult search for meaning ... That the author\'s younger self could also fit this description doesn\'t seem coincidental. Yet, her older self appears to have found her way, and the heartfelt account that has materialized is proof.
Andy Horowitz
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books Horowitz, a political and environmental historian, pushes back on decontextualized narratives ... While the title of Horowitz’s book implies the existence of a definitive account, ascribing nonpareil authority to a single narrative is a flawed construct. The desire for a conclusive exposition of catastrophe comes from the impulse to comprehend what is impossible to grasp in aggregate. This is not to say that the author’s work isn’t exhaustive. Calling upon a century of history to tell the story of what many Americans limit to a span of days or weeks, Horowitz’s Katrina is a devastating and important text for understanding the deep-seated inequality, infrastructure failure, and government carelessness that led to one of America’s worst disasters ... Reading Horowitz in the age of COVID-19, as the powerful determine who and what are expendable, feels especially instructive.
Kerri Arsenault
Rave The Boston Globe Pensive and heartfelt, the author’s nuanced regional history is enriched by family background ... In analyzing a power structure that binds the region’s economic fate to avaricious outside forces, [Arsenault\'s] thinking expands and her relationship with the area gains new dimensions.
Sarah M. Broom
Rave The Advocate An amalgam of reporting and lived experience, it’s a deeply personal and detailed history of family and place ... one of the most distinctive and important entries in the canon of New Orleans literature produced in the post-Katrina era. Broom writes from an insider’s perspective of loss and recovery, but she also frames her subjects, and herself, outside of catastrophe ... [Broom\'s] storytelling is imbued with layers and polysemy and explores themes of lineage, passage, and grief. She writes in detail of a time long before she was born, conceptualizing history as solid ground upon which to build the structure of her story.