About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Questlove and Ben Greenman
Positive The Observer (UK) For all the author’s wisdom and charm, his blizzard of names and facts is likely to overwhelm, rather than exhilarate, the uninitiated. The book at times resembles an annotated playlist ... Provided you have a little prior knowledge, it’s a wonderful ride, coloured by personal digressions and crisp observations.
Sly Stone
Mixed The Guardian (UK) A cleaned-up Stone signs off with some watery opinions about politics and music – a wan conclusion to a frustrating book ... It might have been more rewarding to play with his mysteries and evasions instead of trying to wrestle his life into a conventional narrative: let Sly be sly.
Scott J Shapiro
Positive The Guardian (UK) The title of Scott Shapiro’s lively history is a little too whimsical for my palate but it does advertise his technique of using vivid case studies to dramatise a technically complex subject ... His impish humour and freewheeling erudition suit a world saturated in pop culture ... [Hackers] see it as a game. Shapiro’s achievement is to tell you how it is played.
Greta Thunberg
Positive The Guardian (UK) Nothing small about her latest ... This time she takes on a curatorial role, convening a kind of supergroup of scientists, activists and authors, each of whom contributes a short essay about the mess we’re in ... Amid all the maps, graphs and hair-raising statistics, Thunberg’s connective essays give the book an angry moral pulse ... A valuable resource for anyone who wants an ironclad summary of the problems, combined with some credible remedies.
Keiron Pim
Positive The Guardian (UK) Pim’s book is a little longer than it needs to be, swollen by multi-page plot summaries of each novel and slow to get off the blocks, but his effort to understand the man in full is profound and the result feels definitive. His research empowers him to be rigorously sceptical of a writer who was an unreliable historian of both the empire and his own life, telling outrageous lies about his war record, his education, his birthplace and, most significantly, his family.
Bono
Rave The Guardian (UK) Nobody has done more to expand the parameters of rock stardom, often in contentious ways ... Running to 557 pages, Surrender is characteristically expansive, but it whizzes by ... Bono has storytelling verve and a genuine desire for self-examination, neither of which is guaranteed in rock memoirs. He is enthusiastic about praising others, often at his own expense ... There’s some blarney here – a weakness for the too-cute aphorism and the florid metaphor – but Bono’s appetite for contradictions and humiliations, which goes far beyond tactical self-deprecation, more than compensates ... [A] generous, energetic book.
Linda Kinstler
Rave The Guardian (UK) Victims and perpetrators meet in Kinstler’s bloodline, but family history is only one strand of a remarkable book that braids together her own rigorously reported investigations in 10 countries with the survivors’ eight-decade quest for justice...and poetic meditations on such subjects as history, law, Latvian identity, Franz Kafka and the politics of remembrance. This is a tremendous feat of storytelling, propelled by numerous twists and revelations, yet anchored by a deep moral seriousness ... Enthralling, sobering.
Ed. by Tom Gatti
Positive The Guardian (UK) Subjects range from Mozart to Ms Dynamite and the further one gets from the canon, the more enlivening it is. There’s something charmingly idiosyncratic about Lionel Shriver’s passion for the film soundtracks of Mark Knopfler or Rachel Kushner’s urgent sales pitch for the Gun Club’s fourth album. Ironically for a book about albums, Long Players is one to dip into rather than absorb in one sitting. As the subtitle suggests, there’s a heavy bias towards memoir rather than criticism, with only four professional music journalists in the mix ... The epiphanies fly so thick and fast that it’s refreshing when Sarah Hall rejects nostalgia to insist on the perpetual newness of Radiohead’s OK Computer or Mark Ellen celebrates the goofy escapism of the B52’s debut rather than some profound masterpiece ... The brief means that you always learn something about the writer but not necessarily enough about the music ... David Mitchell achieves the optimum blend of \'me\' and \'you\' by deftly folding a track-by-track analysis into his account of a stroll through Great Malvern in 1987 with Blue in his Walkman for the first time, colouring every step with magic.
Sheldon Pearce
Mixed The Guardian (UK) ... lacks the polyphonic vitality of the best oral histories, a format that better serves the story of a collective endeavour than a single life. With so many key players dead, incarcerated or otherwise inaccessible, Pearce’s principled refusal to plug the gaps with archive material can be frustrating. He does, however, track down unfamiliar voices, including doctors, journalists and a jury member, to elaborate the broader context of gang warfare, racist policing and moral hysteria around hip-hop. Tupac made some horrendous choices but he had good reason to be paranoid ... Strikingly, he is compared to James Baldwin, Fred Hampton, Barack Obama and Malcolm X but no other rappers, as if it would be disrespectful to imagine him ending up, like former Death Row labelmates Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg, comfortably mainstream. Whether he would really have become a thought leader who reawakened black power for a new generation can never be known because he died during the most chaotic period of his life, when his worst instincts were nurtured and his best ones stifled. The wisest voices in Changes avoid grand claims and say simply that Tupac – so young, so conflicted – was robbed of the chance to rewrite the script.
Marcus J. Moore
Mixed The Guardian (UK) The friends and collaborators interviewed by Marcus J. Moore in The Butterfly Effect have nothing to report but his phenomenal dedication to his craft, bringing to mind the joke about the job candidate who says that his worst quality is perfectionism ... If there is a way to rewire this flawless ascent into a compelling narrative, then Moore hasn’t found it. Even as he praises Lamar’s verbal precision, his own prose is hobbled by industry jargon and incoherent metaphors ... Hyperbole runs riot ... The strongest chapter documents the painstaking creation of To Pimp a Butterfly ... Having made BLM so integral to the book, Moore seems reluctant to explore how great artists are always imperfect activists. So it goes. While Lamar never stops asking difficult questions, Moore asks too few.
Daniel Susskind
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... an explainer rather than a polemic, written in the relentlessly reasonable tone that dominates popular economics: the voice of a clever, sensible man telling you what’s what. He always has a helpful graph to hand and a greatest hits collection of anecdotes about technology and society ... The virtue of his reluctance to take a firm political position on an inevitably political issue is that it makes pragmatism and idealism seem to point in the same direction. While other writers make a strongly socialist, feminist or environmentalist case for a post-work world, he says simply that the jobs will go and we’ll have to make the best of it. In light of the current state of political leadership, his optimistic sign-off feels more dutiful than persuasive. Still, if AI really does to employment what previous technologies did not, radical change can’t be postponed indefinitely. It may well be utopia or bust.