About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Chuck Klosterman
Positive The Oregonian Idiosyncratic and amusing and very rarely irritating. Its lack of portentousness can be found right there on its cover ... A highly personalized evaluation of recent American history ... Klosterman’s take on all of this often is insightful ... That said, none of it is driven by scholarship. The Nineties is a book about the author’s specific interests. In the acknowledgements, he admits the work is an \'inessential project.\' It’s still an entertaining tour. Klosterman skillfully analyzes Gen-X touchstones.
David French
Mixed The Oregonian ... even if our current tattered state of the nation makes secession appear reasonable, that doesn’t make...David French’s new book...relevant. Our failure so far to develop \'cultural antibodies,\' as French puts it, will mean continued political dysfunction in the years ahead, probably more violence as well. But it’s highly unlikely it will mean secession ... French, a Harvard-trained lawyer and old-school conservative, is better served when he focuses on one of the key reasons Americans have become so divided: cable news and the internet.
Caroline Moorehead
Positive The Oregonian It doesn’t have the tragic drama and driving narrative of A Train in Winter; instead, it’s chiefly a character piece, a collection of vignettes about these women going about a serious business, and relying on one another for their very lives ... But most of all, “A House in the Mountains” is a story of friendship, \'about how much women have in common with each other, and what they can achieve when they work together.\'
Thomas Harris
Mixed The Oregonian \"Harris knows how to write memorable characters and stories. It doesn’t really matter that those characters and stories aren’t believable. His straightforward prose hurtles along, keeping you turning pages so fast you forget to question how over-the-top it all is ... For Thomas Harris fans, Cari Mora will be comfort food: whimsically brutal and odd and silly, lacking only Hannibal’s signature cannibalism. For those who’ve never read one of Harris’ novels, you can probably wait for the movie.\
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Positive The Oregonian \"[The book\'s] narrative is compelling throughout, but it is a funny little book. It opens with a 21-page glossary of tennis terms that is so basic it includes \'Ad court\' (\'The left side of the court\') and \'Backswing\' (\'The action of drawing back the racket to hit the ball\'), suggesting this is a tennis tome for people who know next to nothing about tennis. Just a handful of pages later, however, Phillips calls big-serving Canadian Milos Raonic, the 2016 Wimbledon finalist, \'the Clark Graebner we didn\'t ask for but deserve.\' Do you know who Clark Graebner is? If so, you don\'t need a 21-page glossary of tennis terms. Maybe the glossary is tongue-in-check. It\'s not clear ... We can hope that Rowan Ricardo Phillips will be watching [the 2019 Australian Open] and will offer up his insights in \'The Circuit II.\'\
Stephen King
Rave The Oregonian King rises to the challenge. He knows what he's up against, and so he's written a time-travel novel that isn't about traveling through time or changing history. It's not even about Oswald, who exists mostly at the edges, constantly disappearing around corners like a cockroach … At first, King's depiction of this disappeared world seems hopelessly treacly, but then we realize this is Jake's idea of it. Slowly, the real America comes into focus, the one in which goodness is liberally leavened with paranoia and racism.
Adam Sisman
Positive The Oregonian “John le Carré: The Biography shows us that the novelist's real life is just as fascinating as those le Carre depicts in his novels. Though le Carre described his five-plus years in intelligence work as "negligible," Sisman proves that his subject is just being self-effacing—and that there's plenty more in the author's life worth digging into.”