About Book Marks
Dan Piepenbring
Recent Reviews
Rave Harpers Doctorow offers a masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley ... Doctorow tells it all in good humor. Somehow he believes that tech can be brought to heel, that a coalition of the fed up and fearful will usher in a new wave of trust-busting regulation, or at least nudge things in the right direction. I hope he’s right.
Positive Harper's Much resistance to EA derives from what we might call optimization fatigue—and, as Edmonds points out, from lingering accusations of heartlessness
Positive Harper's A searching, charmingly discursive meditation on zoos ... Zambreno’s reveries flit between criticism, history, and memoir—an approach well-suited to the diffuse melancholy of the zoo ... The second half of Animal Stories...lacks the immediacy of the zoo piece.
Pan Harper\'s Reads like an anti-thriller—this despite its international ambit and the corpses of prominent statesmen strewn higgledy-piggledy across its pages ... In Ball’s telling, the heroic and the despotic run together into a generic sequence of procuration, murder, and cover-up, replayed at such dizzying speed that one can only succumb to whiplash ... Ball draws frustratingly scant conclusions ... In its breadth and aloofness, Death to Order feels like a distant cousin of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y ... Both have the woozy, maddening force of a carousel stuck in overdrive.
Positive Harper\'s For a book that is, at base, a story of the serpentine ways of the insurance industry, Born in Flames includes arresting images ... Ansfield has found a way to emphasize the moral in \'moral hazard.\'
Positive Harpers This setup gives Castillo a long satirical runway, even some room for light sci-fi—all to the good. But Moderation is really a romantic comedy of the I-fell-for-my-boss variety. Though the love story left me cold...I applaud its trappings, which are daringly loveless, even churlish ... Castillo, despite some missteps, has the confidence to pull it off—but it’s a dangerous game.
Positive Harper's I enjoyed Shuang’s sick, sad sense of humor and his left-turn endings ... I sometimes felt like I was reading Jesus’ Son with the drugs replaced by magical realism. Still, Shuang’s prose, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, is hypnotic and taut, and cultural differences aside, S—— is a familiar city, gutted by globalism, its blank-faced sleepwalkers at once idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable.
Positive Harpers It’s billed as a love story; I don’t know if it is. Whatever held the Baileys together, whatever kept them alive, was stranger and plainer than love, harder to come by, and even harder to explain ... Has an admirably light touch; her short sentences contain something of the Baileys’ emotionlessness, their desolation, silence, and the slow putrefaction of their faculties. Her eye for detail also brings alive the surreal sensory fusillade of the couple’s improbable rescue ... I badly wanted to know how their marriage fared in those years and the ones beyond ... I don\'t understand.
Rave Harpers You may expect a book charged with awe and bioluminescent wonder. In fact it’s a much darker affair ... Frank is an unrepentant maximalist, a lover of wide scope and picayune detail.
Mixed Harper\'s A Philosophy of Shame is never quite sprung. The book extends a rickety rope bridge between psychological shame—the I-must-bury-my-face kind that follows when one is caught being stupid, horny, or poor—and patriotic shame, which fells those in power with its righteous anger ... Gros’s efforts to isolate shame only prove how imbricated it is with guilt, humiliation, remorse, and rage ... That said, Gros still offers a diverting whistle-stop tour.
Rave Harper's Contains a Mylar Miracle-Pack of intrigue, with everything you’d expect from a long-submerged, intergenerational blue-blooded drama. Along with the succession battle, it’s got phenobarbital addiction, involuntary commitment to a mental institution, boardroom humiliations, sexual predation, and a full century of functioning alcoholics. But its real business is the peculiar blood sport called filial love.
Positive Harper's Michael M. Greenburg goes into compendious detail about the debacle ... Greenburg’s writing is technical, and never especially artful, but I was held in suspense.
Positive Harper\'s Magazine It can take centuries for mass infatuations, their causes and consequences, to come into focus. When they finally do, we get such books as The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession ... Like bottles of champagne recovered from old shipwrecks, [the flowers] invited connoisseurship.
Rave Harper\'s A principled and forbidding project, an edifice to reason built on a foundation of sorrow ... Poignant ... Halting, haunted.
Mixed Harper\'s Magazine Fastidiously clipped prose ... There’s a message here about labor, precarity, and alienation: a muted, distant longing, as when you remember a Christmas present you really wanted as a kid but never got. But it feels sketched in ... I was irked by Baglin’s refusal to identify the restaurant, its flagship product, etc. It felt critically important to know whether I was under the Golden Arches or not. The novel’s semihallucinatory tone called for the monotonous, demoralizing exactitude of a trademark.
Positive Harper\'s You may want to dismiss Crumb as a morsel of some strange loaf, fallen to the ground to be swept away. But today he is shown by David Zwirner, among the bluest of the blue-chip galleries, and his pieces command six figures. The perverts won.
Positive Harpers Alarming and somehow moving.
Mixed Harpers Tinline’s book is an astute study of a fiction warped under its own weight ... But he lacks patience for the paranoid style in American politics ... Tinline, who is British, doesn’t quite know what to do about the softer side of America’s conspiracy dabbling—the way these theories express our collective frustration, our yearning for the unknowable, our bumptious camaraderie.
Mixed Harpers Trades its comical grandiosity for noirish brevity, with mixed results ... A good chunk of the novel amounts to fun facts about suicide.
Rave Harpers Little, Brown has given Waste Wars a bright cover, maybe to telegraph the abundant humor and humanity of Clapp’s prose. And yet. You can absorb only so much polychlorinated biphenyl and polybrominated diphenyl ether before you realize you’re being poisoned. As indictments of globalism go, the trash trade is almost too perfect: too stupefyingly myopic; too ceaseless, vast, and sad.
Positive Harpers It can be hard to tell Jansson’s characters apart. They all mourn and nurse their private grievances. The blur may be intentional: the sun seems to dry the distinctions out of them, and they know it ... This book’s original dust jacket called it \'an indictment of the American way of old age,\' which is too strong an assertion for such a wistful tale, though it has notes of well-deserved condescension. Probably only a Scandinavian could have written it. Jansson knew she’d be retiring to the ample bosom of the Finnish welfare state, not hacking it out with clipped coupons and wraparound sunglasses.
Rave Harper\'s Elegant ... Both flinty and sinuous, and it accommodates many messes.
Rave Harper\'s \"...his prose here, as ever, is so redoubtably stylish that I almost wish he’d enshrined every last tryst in print. What he has gotten down are the wisdom, fun, churlishness, humor, vanity, despair, agony, elevation, debasement, discovery, and delight, along with the bad breath, the body odor, the crabs, and the English Leather liberally applied. Above all, the beauty ... Clearly this is not a book for prudes. An anecdote about \'an entire football\' (American or Euro, I cannot say) used at \'a fisting colony in Normandy\' had me clutching my pearls. On the whole, though, White respects carnality too much to profane it. He can describe an episode of defecation in a two-car garage as if it were the plainest, tenderest thing, a chaste kiss ... I’ve seen sex written about with passion and dispassion, but seldom in the same book, and never in the same sentence. Maybe everyone in their eighties should write candidly, fearlessly ... But really what I want is for White to have access to everyone’s memories, their spank banks, with full creative license ... Line for line, I can’t recall the last time I enjoyed reading anything so much.\
Mixed Harpers Chappel delves into statistics and academic conferences more than he does the psychology of old age, which he can’t quite bring to life. He’s what you’d call a big-picture guy, writing about a subject whose pathos is all in the close-ups. Even so, there’s a profound loneliness skulking around his book.
Rave Harpers She’s excellent on the long-term effects of existing in order to want—how emotion and self-discovery were channeled through consumption.
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.