About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Charles Wheelan
Rave NPR ... a swift and refreshing escape during these isolated, isolating times. It is also a disarming repudiation of those patronizing and \"powerful social forces\" that prevent too many families from similar adventures, and a waggish examination of nuclear (pun intended) family dynamics ... If this sounds like an utterly conventional book to hit the shelves in 2021 — an upper-middle class white family traveling the world together — you\'d be right. Sort of. There\'s nothing especially novel in the premise alone, despite the obvious hazards involved in such a bold endeavor. And as the American publishing industry rightfully continues to grapple with a conspicuous lack of diversity, one might be tempted to question how or why such a book ultimately landed on the shelves. Only by chance did I snag an early copy myself, but Wheelan quickly proves an astute chronicler of both family life and foreign cultures. And ironically, it\'s often the utter normalcy of the Wheelan family that makes this travelogue so endearing.
B. J. Hollars
Positive NPR ... the case files in Hollars\' colorful compendium are every bit as folksy, every bit as strange ... while Hollars makes sure to frolic in the fiction, to swim deep into the strange, he pays particular (if never quite enough) attention to the other half of the equation: The all-too-human feedback, the terrestrial roots of these enduring myths, the motives behind the mysteries ... a breezy read, often very funny, and occasionally — at its best — illuminating. Serious cryptozoologists, ufologists, and devotees of the strange may find Hollars\' topical approach to the oddities themselves unfulfilling, but for those just entering the waters it\'s both a quirky primer on some of the Midwest\'s most bizarre stories and a fresh perspective on small-town culture. As a literary pursuit, it\'s the latter half of this equation that rings the loudest, however, and I often found myself wishing that Hollars had spent less time investigating the veracity of the mysteries themselves — a mostly futile effort — and more diagnosing what these stories mean to the communities and individuals that have so long nourished them ... treads the most novel and gripping terrain when it ditches the mystery and returns to the everyday, to Main Street — to us. Hollars has a tendency to soliloquize about the virtue of keeping an open mind, about the nature of scientific inquiry, about the professional perils of paranormal investigation, but too often, these moments fall short of revelatory. It\'s when Hollars retrains his eye on his small-town Midwestern milieu that Midwestern Strange shoots fire from its nostrils and truly comes alive.
David Roberts
Mixed NPR To steer his trip, Roberts relies heavily on both Escalante\'s journal and report compiled by a bevy of scholars in celebration of the expedition\'s bicentennial ... Roberts is clearly infatuated with both texts, but it\'s in the minutiae of these complimentary guides that Roberts will likely lose many readers; neither of the accounts were written to entertain, and Roberts himself—though occasionally wringing insight from between the lines—falls short of truly re-animating the expedition ... rather than ditch the trail in pursuit of more fertile ground—the margins of my copy are filled with personal pleas for him and his wife to go rogue and chase a little whimsy—the author remains frustratingly dutiful to the original route ... It\'s unfortunate that Roberts relegates his sickness to the periphery of his road trip, for it\'s in those rare instances when he humors the sentiments of his own mortality—when he honestly confronts the limits of his latest adventure and affords himself the luxury of reflection—that Escalante\'s Dream finally comes to life.
Julian Smith and David Wolman
Rave NPR The old axiom...claims there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. But in Aloha Rodeo, a slim and swift read, Wolman and Smith juggle both to often thrilling effect ... To be certain, this is hardly an exhaustive text; the history is limited to a few key players and fueled first and foremost by narrative. Those rare scholars looking for a complete history of the cattle trade in Hawaii should probably look elsewhere. But for the rest of us greenhorns, Aloha Rodeo is a gripping primer.
Sam Anderson
Rave The Atlantic Sam Anderson’s ambitious new book about Oklahoma City reanimates a place that has too often been portrayed as simplistic ... one of the more exciting new profiles of a Plains city in recent memory ... What could have easily devolved into a bone-dry academic text instead surfaces as an animated Plains epic that complicates the popular notion of a supposedly stale place ... like many of the best sports stories, Anderson’s deconstruction of the rise and fall and ultimate plateau of the Thunder has less to do with sports than with character—and Oklahoma City, Boom Town explains, is brimming with character ... At the start, there’s a certain whiplash feel to Boom Town. But the further that one reads, the less disparate each thread feels, until finally a theme develops and the reader begins hunting for it in the smallest details ... Though Anderson’s empathy for Oklahoma City shines through, Boom Town isn’t a work of boosterism. The author refuses to skip over or whitewash the more unfortunate episodes of the city’s past.
John Branch
Positive The Washington Post He maintains a reporter’s objectivity that allows him to avoid caricaturing and sentimentalizing a lifestyle so often portrayed as if stuck in the cattle-drive era or worse, a bad spaghetti western. Branch’s legwork is astonishing, and he delivers a visceral sense of both the danger of the sport and the grueling schedule of full-time saddle bronc riders ... The author seems at times reluctant to fully elaborate the issues underlying the area’s transformation, perhaps because he wishes to shield the family from criticism, or to escape reprisal from a West often defensive of tradition and suspicious of the outsider, or perhaps simply to avoid distracting from his narrative. Though drought plays a role in the evolution of ranching, the author delves into climate change only peripherally ... Similarly, though broken bones from bronc riding litter nearly every chapter of the book, Branch shies from directly discussing the safety of the sport. And though wives and girlfriends float in and out of this necessarily male-driven narrative, it might be good to hear from the women who hold their families together while the men spend most of the year away from home, saddling up despite the obvious risks. The narrative is so packed with rodeos, rides and injuries that one misses moments of wider reflection on the quest driving the men. But the pros far outweigh the cons in this timely, clear-eyed examination of rodeo and the shifting culture that has long sustained it.