About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Kathleen Hanna
Rave Book Page \"...a timely refresher in resilience, the power of protest art and the tender humanity that we must not lose ... By illustrating how you grew, you can show others how to do the same. With Rebel Girl, Hanna intentionally busts open her feminist idol identity, liberating herself from our perceptions and serving some hard-won wisdom.\
Kristine S. Ervin
Rave BookPage Shattering ... Ervin is a poet, and her language here is lyrical. Her depictions of unimaginable cruelty cut so close to the bone that they feel almost tangibly interior. Rhapsodic and startling, Rabbit Heart moves inside of you and explores the places of rage and grief that are often left unmonitored, revealing both the power and danger of womanhood in a violent world.
Andrew Nagorski
Rave BookPage Saving Freud tells the story of a group of people—including Freud\'s daughter Anna and her lover, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (heiress to the Tiffany & Co. fortune); the U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt; and Marie Bonaparte, princess of Greece and great-grandniece to Napoleon—who did just that...Motivated by love and towering respect for a man and his work, the unlikely team cooperated seamlessly to achieve the near impossible...It is a tale of good-heartedness, of human devotion and of people who unhesitatingly rushed in to do the right thing...In this way, it feels like a relief to read...Far from being a dry historical account, the book\'s emphasis on the personal creates a compelling, page-turning narrative that is wholly engrossing and difficult to put down...Nagorski has written a book for our time, reminding us of the potential for good and adherence to higher ideals in moments of global emergency.
Rebecca Woolf
Rave BookPage ... eschews any such flattering postmortem revisions in favor of the messy, freeing truth ... Woolf does not mince words or deal in niceties in this memoir ... an all-encompassing portrait of a marriage that didn\'t work, and Woolf is as unflinchingly honest about that marriage as she is about the experience of loss that terminated it.
David George Haskell
Rave BookPage From vibrations picked up by single-celled organisms, to the childlike babbling of newly hatched birds, to the astounding invention of the first human instruments, played in cave chambers selected for their resonance, this tale brims with enchanting facts you won’t believe you never knew. Haskell’s prose is suffused with enthusiasm and poetic in form. The way in which he loads each sentence with information is so animated, it’s fair to say this is a book that would talk with its hands if it could ... Where Sounds Wild and Broken truly glows, however, is in the way it invites readers to imagine the listening experiences of others, breaking down the assumption that we all hear alike. With the long history of sound in his grip, Haskell’s definitions of hearing, communication and song become expansive and inclusive.
Kate Moore
Positive BookPage ... compelling not only because of the way it creates an alliance between the reader and the courageous Packard, but also because of how it forces the reader to examine once more the language and attitudes around women’s mental health. In Packard we see a foremother of the female leaders of today: intelligent, tenacious and impossible to cow.
Emily Midorikawa
Rave BookPage Midorikawa breathes life into these long-ago women in ways that make them feel contemporary despite their extraordinary circumstances and distance in time. Her description of Harding enduring an incident of stalking resonates with chilling familiarity. You’ll feel these women’s frustration and conviction, and you’ll cheer at their progressive empowerment ... It’s remarkable that none of these women seems disingenuous. Throughout Out of the Shadows, they occupy a liminal space between genuine belief in supernatural forces and the ingenious ways they used those forces to their own ends. By the book’s end, it no longer matters whether you believe these six remarkable spirit mediums were hoaxes or not; you’ll certainly believe in them.
Jon Dunn
Positive BookPage ... a book that is both an ode to hummingbirds and a remarkable piece of travel literature ... Dunn gives us the facts about hummingbirds, but he also explores the places where hummingbirds intersect with the world they inhabit and the people they affect ... From the narrative of Dunn’s excursion, we learn that a backyard hummingbird sighting is actually an exotic visit from the wide, strange world.
Isabel Allende
Rave Bookpage Allende, a fixture of Latin American storytelling since the publication of The House of the Spirits in 1982, is well qualified to deliver a feminist manifesto. Those who have followed her career are familiar with the number of times she has struggled defiantly to overcome roadblocks in her path ... In The Soul of a Woman , Allende describes these experiences and others that imbued her with the grit and tenacity that define her today ... Allende discusses her past matter-of-factly and directly, without losing her piquante humor. She details her career from its roots in feminist journalism through the literary pursuits that made her a success in spite of adversity and personal tragedy. Ultimately Allende tells us of a life lived fully, for better or worse. The passionate choices she has made are boldly laid out without apologies in this slim volume. Allende even reflects on the twilight of her life, though it seems unbelievable that such a vibrant spirit could ever dim. But when it does, the blaze her life leaves behind will illuminate this world for decades to come.
Sonia Faleiro
Positive BookPage [A] thoughtful, careful narrative of these events and an examination of the many issues influencing this tangled case. Faleiro reconstructs scenes using multiple thorough interviews with the people who were present, and she takes care to never insert herself into her retelling. Through her, however, the reader comes to know the people involved ... Even as corruption and hope vie with one another politically and poverty touches everything, The Good Girls never loses sight of the human heart of its story. It brings us close to these people and their problems and heartaches and, in so doing, makes us examine our own.
Liz Tichenor
Rave BookPage Liz Tichenor’s The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief surprised me. I felt surprise at the grace with which Tichenor shares her walk through shadow. I was surprised by how deeply Tichenor’s articulation of her experience of faith resonated with my own, and by her brushes with the mystical divine that jolted me and left me feeling uncertain. Some might feel surprise at priests cursing in the face of unimaginable grief. Whatever your experience of grief, and whatever your experience of faith, The Night Lake will manage to surprise you, too. But it’s not easy reading ... This is not simply a book for those who have found themselves mired in such grief. It teaches all of us how to be with those who are going through tragedy, how to be vulnerable and how to practice compassion.
Heather Clark
Rave BookPage Biographer and Plath scholar Heather Clark lifts the poet’s life from the Persephone myth it has become and examines it in all its complexity. In the massive effort that is Red Comet, Clark admirably identifies and resists the morbid tendency to look at every moment, every work, as a signpost on the way to Plath’s tragic suicide ... Clark’s detailed, multidimensional treatment gives Plath’s life and work its dignity, character and sense of interiority. We get the full scope of Plath’s incredible talent here ... Considering Plath in this complexifying light, Clark unlooses some of the bonds that have held back this incomparable artist.
Catherine Cho
Rave BookPage In Cho’s hands, the story of her psychosis is also one of her growing up and knitting together her sense of self, even as that self is coming ferociously undone ... There is a sublime quality to this temporal movement. Her illness looms large and mythic, even in its terror ... Cho’s expression of her experience of madness is poetic, and like much good poetry, it points its finger to the lies in our so-called reality.
Eileen Alexander
Rave BookPage As the course of [Alexander\'s] life shifted abruptly and against her will that year, like the lives of so many at the onset of World War II, Alexander responded with unflappable humor and irrepressible intellect, both of which shine through in Love in the Blitz ... That Alexander’s sense of humor remained so resolutely intact throughout only serves to highlight the occasional glimpse of sadness or weariness, and you admire her all the more for it ... Alexander’s unassailable wit makes her an accessible narrator, someone in whom we see pieces of our friends, our sisters and, we hope, ourselves ... For a book of war correspondence, it’s peculiar to note that it’s a laugh-out-loud sort of work, but Alexander’s candor makes her wartime experience real to us. When she shows up for work only to find her workplace bombed, we feel the impact of that moment as though we’re standing next to her. When she stops in her tracks in one letter to wonder if she will ever forget the things she has seen, we pause with her ... After reading Love in the Blitz, events on the 20th-century world stage no longer seem so removed from our own age. We can only hope to conduct ourselves as Alexander did: with tenacity, optimism, tenderness and a perfect zinger for everything.
Helen Jukes
Rave BookPage ... if you can’t literally sink into a honey-sweet bee colony, sinking into Helen Jukes’ A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees is surely the next best thing ... unfolds over a year into ease, sweetness, rhythm and flow ... Still a young voice in the world of nature writing, Jukes joins the ranks of pros like Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald as she brings sharply into focus the details of the natural world that gleams and hums all around us.
Alex Halberstadt
Positive BookPage Halberstadt twitches aside the dismissive curtain we tend to drape over the older members of our families ... What he finds is startling but ought to be familiar in its own way to each of us ... As Halberstadt weaves his familial background out of several trips across Russia and Eastern Europe in a quest for information, a curious effect occurs. Time becomes less linear and seems to lie around us, piled in no particular order, like snow. The past is still present with us; nothing is truly left behind.
Helen Fremont
Positive BookPage This tragic and unsettling (but also humorous and wry) memoir opens with an event that becomes the impetus of Fremont’s attempt to make sense of it all. Weeks after attending her father’s funeral, she receives a letter informing her of her own disinheritance ... No one could accuse the family in The Escape Artist of keeping only small secrets, but in its truth-telling, it serves as a catharsis for anyone who has ever spent time hiding the skeletons of others.
Steve Inskeep
Positive BookPage Present are all the things we like in an American tale: frontier adventure, fame and a conflict that’s cast as tragic and romantic. But Inskeep, wise to the lure he has set out, doesn’t give us the story we expect. Failures and near misses are rife ... Inskeep deepens the tale beyond the traditional American narrative, giving us an insightful look at two people who seem familiar even all these years later: an ambitious and brilliant woman shackled by her gender and an imperfect dreamer who often comes close to doing the right thing. Within the political theater of this pre-Civil War drama, we just might find ourselves.
Jack Hartnell
Positive BookPage ... gloriously illustrated ... While capturing the humor inherent in looking so far back in time, Hartnell points to the common humanity between our modern selves and the men (and women!) who left behind these writings ... Hartnell’s head-to-toe examination of the medieval body invokes nearly all other aspects of medieval culture and life. Food, literature, music and the prevalence of the spiritual are all present in great detail in Medieval Bodies, and it makes sense: We, on an ordinary day, do not perceive ourselves as a collection of viscera. We understand ourselves, both physically and otherwise, in relation to the things we come into contact with in the surrounding world. This was also true of our long-ago ancestors—and in making this clear, Hartnell’s book provides a most human look into a world that is neither so far away nor very separate from us at all.
Sheila Weller
Rave BookPage ... neither neglects nor glosses over any part of Fisher’s life ... As Weller illustrates so well in her biography, Fisher gave, and gave, and gave in this way, mentoring generations of people around the world just by living large with irrepressible honesty and wit ... Pulling from extensive research and interviews done with everyone from the neighborhood children Fisher grew up with to her extensive group of cherished friends, Weller knits these pieces together into an engrossing and meaningful look at the inner life of a woman who described herself as \'a writer who acts.\' The result is a project that is breathtaking in its size and scope—Fisher lived a lot, and that is felt in page after page ... But like Fisher’s life itself, A Life on the Edge runs deep. It is less a long book than a very full one. It’s moving, truthful and a fitting tribute to its subject and to her unflappable courage and transparency. Reading Weller’s portrait of Fisher, you will miss her, deeply.
Caitlin Doughty
Rave BookPage Doughty’s forthright but playful tone is apparent before you even get to the table of contents ... perhaps the most enchanting little book ever to discuss such matters as whether or not one’s body might explode if one’s final meal before being loaded into the crematorium included popcorn ... It is to her credit that Doughty not only answers those questions that would seem to fall easily within her area of expertise but dutifully chases down the science that might provide a plausible answer to the fate of an astronaut who slipped from this mortal coil while on a spacewalk ... However, this book is by no means solely for death-curious children. Most if not all of the answers provided alongside the charmingly gothic illustrations will be news to the average adult reader, as well ... provides answers to questions both humorous and moving, bringing tiny and full-sized mortals alike to a greater comfort with and understanding of the one transition that will happen to us all.
Shelby Lorman
Positive BookPage Funny, intelligent, weary ... Though full of the cartoons that populate Lorman’s Instagram, the book resists simply being a pithy ode to the many potholes that exist in the female experience. Lorman writes sensitively about the behaviors that these acts of marginalization often prompt in women, conditioned as we are to make ourselves small. It can get a little uncomfortable when she describes back to you the many ways you’ve taken up the emotional labor for men, but she does so while speaking in the tones of your most sympathetic, self-aware friend. Drawing it all together at the end is an emotionally intelligent and compassionate conclusion to an argument you didn’t even realize that you were reading. The gift of Awards for Good Boys lies in the way it lightly bops you on the head with the clarity you need to see through the madness disguising itself as acceptable.
Lisa Taddeo
Rave BookPage ...Taddeo doesn’t shy away from the unspoken, the uncomfortable and the shadow sides of sexuality. This is by necessity a ruthless book as it explores the half-concealed aspects of not only the female sex life but also the inner and secret lives of women ... Three Women is merciless, impossible to put down and so revealing as to be uncomfortable. As the women share themselves, you find yourself reflected. It’s a multifaceted work that changes as you turn it, casting light in unexpected corners that you never before considered—and had perhaps even been guarding against.