About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sonia Purnell
Positive Harper\'s \"Purnell convincingly turns a comic-book enchantress into a sensualist operator, equally fluent in U.N. Security Council resolutions, table linens, and oral sex ... Purnell marshals a lot of sympathy for Pamela, but in the end hers is a story of old money, amorality, and soft power. One of her fans was Bill Clinton, who speaks on the final page: \'Did she have a good time living? Yes, she did. Good for her.\'\'
Yoko Tawada, trans. Susan Bernofsky
Rave Harpers It’s almost a Celan smoothie: icy, sweet, and, of course, foamy, a little treat from the tart fruits of the poet’s labor. You could walk around the mall with it. It coats your tongue, numbs your hand, and soon you have to pee, and it’s all very nice, and then it’s over. Tawada has smuggled tons of Celan references into it.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Rave Harper\'s Magazine I turned to it seeking validation and found something much better: the complete destabilization of my concept of paternity ... For the novitiate dad, reading parts of Father Time feels a bit like having your life narrated by David Attenborough.
Caroline Crampton
Positive Harper\'s Since her cancer treatment, Crampton has found herself irretrievably fragile, or irretrievably aware of her fragility: tantamount to the same thing, she points out ... There should be no surprise that a world with \"insert helpline number here\" is also a world where we make doctors out of search engines; where we pay for Zeebo-brand \"honest placebo pills\" because it still feels healthy to be taking something, even if that something is nothing.
Emmett Rensin
Positive Harper\'s Emmett Rensin reflects on the ironies and humiliations of losing one’s mind in a nation that dehumanizes even its \"normal\" citizens ... His book is caustic and incisive, never more so than when his readers, curled up neurotypically on our couches, are in his sights.
Robert Shaplen
Rave Harper\'s It’s fun to view this much older affair through the lens of Shaplen’s durable midcentury elegance—looking back in time twice.
Carrie Sun
Positive Harpers Emphatically not polemical. In its 352 pages, inequality comes up about a quarter of the way through and passingly thereafter. Marx gets a nod in the final chapter. Its primer on investment banking is lucid, but what Sun knows best are the caprices of the overclass ... The same qualities that nearly reduced her to an automaton have made her an astute, punctilious narrator. Her billionaire boss, hugging her goodbye, gets off easy—but they always do. Apparently he’s almost never interviewed or photographed. A coup, then, that in these pages he’s fully, suboptimally human.
Garrett M. Graff
Positive Harpers The government’s prickly paternalism—and its annoying habit of rechristening flying objects every few decades, most recently as UAPs—generated countless conspiracy theories, which Graff soberly investigates, down to the last crop circle and cattle mutilation.
Benjamin Labatut
Positive Harpers The bulk of The MANIAC, after the opening with Ehrenfest, is a would-be oral history of John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath who worked on the Manhattan Project ... The attempt at polyphony is sometimes strained, but the anecdotal approach helps to revive a man often reduced to an encyclopedia entry.
Cameron McWhirter
Rave Harpers Reporters Cameron ­­McWhirter and Zusha Elinson write that America’s obsession with the Old West influenced its military strategy ... American Gun’s coverage...accrues with devastating force.
James Ellroy
Rave Harpers Lush, manic ... Throws some erotic fan fiction into the mix
Nathan Ward
Rave Harpers As with much of Ward’s source material, Siringo’s life can feel retrospectively absurd, too authentic to be real ... [A] handsome telling.
Dan Schreiber
Positive The New York Times Book Review Schreiber is at his best when he’s digging into renowned loci of weirdness, like the White House ... Schreiber brings a formidable amount of research to bear, and he’s careful never to mock any of his subjects, even those who may deserve it. But he’s sometimes too adept at quarantining the weirdness, too certain of where the rational ends and the irrational begins.
Bruce Schneier
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Reads like...a briefing — fused with a manifesto about power and compliance ... Contains a blizzard of...anecdotes ... If this sounds dizzying, it is. Reading A Hacker’s Mind, I began to envision modernity as a rat’s nest of interconnected Rube Goldberg machines held together with Scotch tape and faith ... I’m always happy to read about how the rich are leaching the lifeblood from society, but however appealing its argument, A Hacker’s Mind can be tedious.
Steve Stern
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Stern has blended biography and fabulism into a frothy picaresque that curdles into a haunted, dyspeptic study of Jewish identity ... When it works, there’s nothing quite like it. An exacting describer of feculence, Stern is at ease in his subject’s sordid milieu. Few writers could find the romance in public urinals \'furry with hoarfrost\' or the \'sour-pickle musk\' of a brothel laundress. Fewer still can capture the \'debauch of creation,\' as Stern calls Soutine’s frenzied bouts of painting dead flesh ... At its best, the novel vibrates to the \'sweet celestial confusion\' of Soutine’s painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and irreligious, so hot with life that it can’t help incubating disease ... For all the felicities of Stern’s prose, though, his Soutine remains frustratingly opaque — too distant, even, to register as a stranger to himself. This would be forgivable if the novel weren’t doggedly concerned with the origins of Soutine’s genius, \'the old unanswerable question\' of what makes a painter take up his brush in the first place. Soutine calls it \'the itch,\' the same way he might affectionately refer to a bout of dermatitis. That’s true to form, maybe, but it brings the reader no closer to his motives, his head, his heart ... He has written a story of Parisian artists that’s gloriously free of sentimentality. A shame that it’s often free of real emotion, too.
Werner Herzog, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Rave The New Yorker ... wondrous ... Few writers are better equipped to capture a place so overwhelmingly opaque that it lapses into absurdity, and a life that became an exercise in purposed purposelessness. In Herzog’s hands, Lubang exists outside of time, and Onoda’s war has the eerie gravity of a thought experiment come to life ... Herzog has always been attuned to the ways in which survivalism functions as a form of existentialism. The brutal irony of The Twilight World comes in moments like these, when Onoda succumbs to what a psychologist might call patternicity. He finds meaning everywhere, hearing signals that soon fade into the endless noise ... a funny novel in the same way that Herzog’s film Grizzly Man—about an environmentalist who loved bears, and was eaten by them—is a funny movie. To call it dark, dry, or deadpan is an understatement; it’s more like cosmic farce, or field recordings of the hiccups of fate. The novel’s most humorous events are also its most despairing ... he approaches the task of novel writing with more caution and, somehow, more abandon. He seems to write with an Onoda-like sense of obligation, and, indeed, he has said that he felt fiction was the only appropriate form for telling Onoda’s story ... slow and spectral ... a true story unpredictably enriched with fiction, it seems to shimmer with layers of meaning.
Helen Garner
Rave Harpers This is nominally a legal drama. Garner sat through the whole trial—twice—and she gives its onslaught of forensics and withering cross-examinations a novelist’s treatment ... She grasps people in a way that Malcolm doesn’t. She has horse sense: I cringe to call it that, but that’s what it is.