About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Ann Powers
Rave The Washington Post Remarkably insightful ... Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise ... Astute ... It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.
Lucinda Williams
Rave The Wall Street Journal Captivating ... The often hilarious, occasionally harrowing Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is a bracingly candid chronicle of a sui generis character plotting a ramshackle but ultimately triumphant trajectory.
Charles Portis
Rave The Washington Post A meticulously curated new compendium from the Library of America, which collects his five novels and assorted other works, allows for a fresh opportunity to reckon with his slippery, unsettled legacy ... It’s tempting to point out the disjunction between the author’s fundamental outsider stance and his postmortem embrace by the institutional intelligentsia ... Includes a survey of Portis’s journalism, essays and other nonfiction, ranging from visceral accounts of civil rights violence in the segregated South during the early ’60s to a droll comedic essay from 1977 ... A nervous sense of inevitable, awful and profoundly satisfying violence lurks throughout. In typical Portis fashion, the novel glides to its resolution with the transporting advantage of several well-executed twists.
Bob Dylan
Positive The Washington Post Some of the analyses, which can already be loose, are accompanied by brief pieces that treat the songs as creative writing prompts ... In keeping with the theme of his omniscient zeal for songcraft, Dylan betrays no sense there is anything remotely odd about zigzagging among Jimmy Reed, Rosemary Clooney and Santana, itself a meaningful insight into the wide open apertures of his powers of expression ... Boy, are these essays weird. Longtime Dylan followers are accustomed to the peculiar cast that haunts his songs...and they festoon these pages as well ... These essays are not all terrifying verdicts on the fate of a corrupted humanity. There are history lessons, too! Charmingly, Dylan appears to have done a great deal of research on the material covered, and maybe even breaks a little news here and there.
John Lingan
Rave Wall Street Journal Diagnosing the push-and-pull of John Fogerty’s unnavigable conflicts—between populism and artistic sophistication, control and collaboration—is where \'A Song for Everyone\' is at its best...In Mr. Lingan’s telling, he was an impossibly driven and talented young man, and utterly impossible to deal with...When the group first splintered and then finally imploded—his brother Tom was first to leave—it was with the sort of exhausted finality that ensured a reunion would never be in the cards...Tom Fogerty died in 1990...The brothers never truly reconciled...And yet, 63 years after four kids from El Cerrito first played together, CCR’s music remains a fixture and a crown jewel of American culture...Decades after so many of their peers have been relegated to the \'where are they now?\' file, the resonances of their Herculean labors are everywhere, from Bruce Springsteen to Sonic Youth to \'The Big Lebowski\'...Their reputation has never been greater...That’s one hell of an encore.
Ron Shelton
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... mostly droll, sometimes dolorous account ... a fraught, rollicking and gossipy romp through the funny-in-retrospect ordeal of fighting for a cinematic project that seemed as unlikely to succeed as a Class A shortstop making it to the Show ... Mr. Shelton has been in the movie business for a long time, and he has the exasperation with studio decisions to show for it.