About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Laurence Leamer
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... frothy prose ... The trouble with reading about Capote’s swans, all so fluffy and flighty, is that it soon becomes hard to tell them apart, a struggle further complicated by the increasingly dizzying Venn diagram of their intersecting love affairs.
Craig Taylor
Rave Daily Mail (UK) One of Craig Taylor’s many skills as an interviewer lies in his eye for the vivid detail that captures a larger abstraction ... [a] remarkable book ... touching autobiographical interludes ... Taylor also manages to convey the zest and ebullience of New Yorkers, captured in the punchiness of their speech patterns.
Sam Wasson
Positive The Daily Mail Wasson tells the story of its making with pace and verve, though his prose can sometimes be portentous. He keeps noting any spot of bad weather as though it were an omen, and he finds it hard to resist a bit of purple prose.
Joe Moran
Positive The Dailymail (UK) \"Joe Moran is a wonderfully sharp writer, calm, precise and quietly comical ... He also happens to be Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, and so a veteran of marking essays and dissertations, and of ploughing through works by his fellow academics. He drops hints that this new book is a reaction to the solemn ethos of obscurity that prevails in academia ... he writes with a playful clarity that makes First You Write A Sentence a joy to read ... Moran’s own sentences are perfect advertisements for the aims they espouse. He uses a wide, unsnobbish range of cultural references, from high to low ... Moran’s own sentences are so stylish that many writers may well feel not so much encouraged as intimidated. After reading this maestro’s manual, I’m sorry to say I found the act of writing that much harder, a bit like trying to dance on soft clay in wellington boots.
Tina Brown
Mixed The New York Review of Books More often than not, though, Brown’s jibes are too generalized, too hand-me-down, to draw blood ... Brown spares herself the cynicism she accords others ... By and large, the diary form follows the vicissitudes of life too closely for a shape or clear themes to emerge, but one way of reading The Vanity Fair Diaries is as the record of one woman’s gradual realization of her ever-increasing market value.