About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Al Pacino
Positive Air Mail Like spending several hours with a beloved elder ... It’s not that Pacino is falsely modest, but he often seems reluctant to toot his own horn—a quality that is both disarming and frustrating in a memoirist ... The spirit of this memoir: half–victory lap, half-shrug.
Emily Nussbaum
Rave Air Mail Show me a history of reality TV and, honestly, sorry, I don’t much care. But show me a history of reality TV written by Emily Nussbaum...and I am now very interested ... Does not disappoint. This is a smart, thorough, often skeptical history of the genre. It is also witty and extremely entertaining.
John Higgs
Positive Airmail Hiding between the covers of Love and Let Die is a smart and lively 5,000-word essay on, as the subtitle promises, James Bond, the Beatles, and the British Psyche. John Higgs’s book is quite a bit longer, however ... Tracking Higgs’s argument can feel at times like trying to make sense of the plot of an actual Bond movie, and without adrenalized action sequences to power you past the bloat ... A problem with Love and Let Die is that by the halfway mark, the 60s have ended, the Beatles have broken up, Sean Connery has quit Bond, and Higgs’s point has been made—and still he presses on ... I eventually chose to read Love and Let Die not as a book-length argument or critical history but rather as a rambling, loosely organized, periodically delightful compendium devoted to two subjects I’m very fond of.
Paul Newman
Positive Air Mail An odd duck of a book — welcome, but odd ... Is The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man merely a supplement to The Last Movie Stars? For readers who have watched the series, the book can’t help but suffer in comparison for not being able to include glorious clip after glorious clip of Newman in action across his lengthy filmography ... The memoir is necessarily incomplete, even speculative—a found object of sorts that has been carefully shaded and massaged into a facsimile of what Newman might have intended if he hadn’t turned his back on the whole thing. However grateful one is to have it—and it’s not pretending to be a smoothly polished work—it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster ... Don’t let that scare you: there is much to cherish here. The book is in Newman’s voice, with occasional interjections from the interviews with Woodward and others. It’s a familiar voice: genial but shrewd, self-deprecating but resolute ... Emotionally cohesive and moving ... Some passages, such as Newman’s account of his mother’s smothering but narcissistic love, have the quality of revelation turned rote ... Don’t let that scare you, either. Some tidbits of decent gossip have managed to lodge between these covers.
Simon Morrison
Mixed Air Mail It’s fitting that Nicks would inspire a new book as cluttered and, sometimes, distracting as one imagines her walk-in closets are, but one that also pays her the perhaps overdue compliment of taking her seriously ... [Morrison] has attempted not a straightforward biography...eyes and nose turned nobly away from the sewer. But Mirror in the Sky is not really a critical biography, either; the term is too formal and confining for a book that reads less like a well-argued appreciation than a subreddit run by an obsessive-compulsive super-fan, albeit a smart, insightful one ... Morrison [has a] flair for the digressive ... When it comes to the music itself, Morrison can be enlightening, if arid ... He’s almost too ardent a champion. At risk of the sin myself, I’ll note that he can be mansplainy, as well ... But my incessant quibbling aside, I enjoyed reading Mirror in the Sky—quibbles are a sign of engagement, after all.
Lara Gabrielle
Rave Air Mail An entertaining, first-rate biography that necessarily serves, like it or not, as a corrective to Hollywood myth ... Gabrielle...spent nine years digging through archives and interviewing anyone she could find who knew Davies ... Among the delights of Gabrielle’s book are its forays into very old-school slang ... Despite the evident breadth and depth of Gabrielle’s research, her many insights, and her obvious affection for Davies, the woman herself remains at a bit of a remove—a vivid presence seen and felt, but not quite grasped. One problem is that, as a stutterer, she was a reluctant interviewee ... Davies the performer is an easier get.
Edward Carey
Positive The New York Times Book Review Pinocchio endures; why, I’m not sure ... Amid this glut, the novelist and playwright Edward Carey has had the inspired idea to cut the marionette loose and focus instead on Geppetto, the lonely old woodcutter who carves Pinocchio from an enchanted block of pine, giving him form and life — which is about as close as men get to immaculate conception, even in fantasy. Carey’s odd duck of a book is less a proper novel than a riff on the entwined themes of fatherhood and creative spark ... What keeps this book afloat, as it were, is the voice Carey gives to Geppetto. The author — whose previous books include Little, a historical novel about Madame Tussaud, and a Dickensian-style trilogy for middle grade readers — is a master of the dusty yet droll tone ... If that prose doesn’t delight you, this is not your book ... his meditations on paternal love and the ache of separation can be moving ... At other times, the slender novel set entirely inside a big stomach feels like a stunt — entertaining, clever, but a stunt nonetheless ... Carey’s dedication haunted me as I finished The Swallowed Man, and enriched it.
Jerry Seinfeld
Positive Air Mail A joke vault in portable form! ... [Seinfeld\'s] autobiographical intro to Is This Anything? is so perceptive and engaging, as are subsequent interstitial glimpses of his offstage life, that I found myself wishing he’d written an honest-to-God memoir; he’s an observational comic, after all, and he’s surely seen some stuff ... The stand-up material is presented chronologically, by decade. Most of it reads funny on the page, especially if read with Seinfeld’s Long Island bray in your head. It helps, too, that his humor is rarely topical, so most jokes don’t date ... Myself, I’m not sure I need to savor his work quite this way, though it’s interesting to chart the changes in Seinfeld’s life through his comic preoccupations ... Seinfeld does seem to have soured a bit with age, growing more irritated than amused when it comes to humankind’s quirks, but even when he was young you could sometimes detect a fastidious lip curl behind a lot of his material. Otherwise, his psyche remains impenetrable.
Debbie Harry
Positive Air Mail The book’s liveliest chapters recount Harry’s pre-fame life ... matter-of-factness, an easy equanimity not typically associated with pop stars, pervades much of Face It, even when describing something as traumatic as a home-invasion rape and robbery at the apartment of her boyfriend and musical partner Chris Stein ... Perhaps she takes things more in stride than ardent fans might hope due to the fact that she was 33, more than old enough to be a has-been, when the band finally broke through ... [Harry] always good company, forthright if not analytic. She even has good things to say about heroin!
Jay McInerney
Positive The New York Times Book Review Bright, Precious Days can’t really be read or discussed apart from its predecessors; it doesn’t hold its own water. I came to think of it less as a sequel than as the latest season of one of the great TV dramas, like The Sopranos or Mad Men — slow to reveal its cards, inherently uneven, but confident that its audience has already invested enough time to take pleasure in the slow accretion of detail and the occasional narrative cul-de-sac that might irritate in less steady hands. If a TV series can now be called novelistic, it seems fair to call a novel TV-istic. I mean it as a high compliment: an art form of sustained intimacy.