About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Francesca Peacock
Mixed The Times (UK) \"Francesca Peacock’s enjoyable book is enriched by accounts of other women who lived remarkably in those remarkable times ... The book does not, however, make any powerful new points about Margaret Cavendish, a woman whose career and eccentricities were already as well known as they deserve to be. A good biography of her, Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker, was written 20 years ago. It is not clear that she needed another.\
Daisy Hay
Positive The Times (UK) This delightful book by the English literature professor Daisy Hay, who has also written biographies of the Romantics and the Disraelis, gives the reader the feeling of being at a rather elevated party.
Adam Rutherford
Positive The Times (UK) Rutherford’s swift, well-written account of these fascinating scientific and moral issues is well worth a read. He avoids the big question of whether we should by arguing, persuasively, that we mostly can’t. Yet the reader is left with the suspicion that at some point...humanity will have to answer that question.
Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe
Mixed The Times (UK) It’s a pleasure to see a couple of serious journalists set about giving McKinsey a good kicking, for the firm is so irritatingly smug ... The thrust of the book’s attack on the firm, though, is not just that McKinsey has made individual mistakes, but that while claiming to make the world a better place, it has made it a worse one. The argument doesn’t quite persuade. Certainly, McKinsey has worked for some companies, such as tobacco and fossil-fuel companies, that harm people and the planet; but since the authors claim that its customers include most of America’s Fortune 500 that’s not really surprising. Certainly, it has encouraged firms to cut costs, but there are no smoking guns to establish its responsibility for the deaths at US Steel, Disney or anywhere else. Certainly, plenty of its customers have sacked lots of workers after it has given them advice. But many firms are inefficiently managed and need to fire people. McKinsey’s job is not to tell them to be nice to their workers and generous to their customers but to help them beat the competition ... To accept the book’s argument, the reader must buy into the notion that modern capitalism is bad, and therefore a firm that makes it work better is making the world worse ... The authors’ politics lead to selective reporting ... the line that McKinsey is a force for evil precludes examination of another, possibly more fruitful, argument: that it doesn’t make much difference, either for good or for ill. Bosses and governments hire it to justify things they wanted to do anyway ... Given its vast fees, the question of whether McKinsey is a waste of money would reward investigation. It might also provide some detail, which the book lacks, about what goes on inside the firm. After 300 pages, McKinsey remains a bit of a mystery to the reader. Had the book concluded that the firm’s expensive consultants are pointless rather than wicked, it would be just as damning and far more annoying to its target.
Lea Ypi
Positive The Times (UK) The point of view of a child, for whom weirdness is normal and small things loom large, is a good one for examining how the death throes of a failing despotism seep into the tiniest corners of its subjects’ lives.
Helena Merriman
Rave The Times (UK) As the story builds towards the denouement, the book becomes more gripping than a thriller, because it is about real lives that were transformed or destroyed by the events described. The story arc, through betrayal and disaster to triumph, is perfect ... it is a cracking tale that deserves retelling and helps to sharpen our collective memory of the half-century of tyranny that our near neighbours endured.
Adam Tooze
Rave The Times (UK) Readers need not trouble themselves with the first hundred or so pages. The account of the spread of the pandemic and the lead-in to lockdown is fine, but it doesn’t hold any surprises for those who were reading the newspapers at the time ... In the absence of an insider’s account, Tooze’s deep understanding and close observation of markets and monetary policymakers provide a pretty good substitute, and the story he tells is a gripping one ... It’s a complex story, which Tooze tells with clarity and verve. Out of a large pile of sows’ ears, in the form of statistics, academic papers and deliberately dull press releases, he weaves a remarkably readable narrative. Cliffhangers abound ... Tooze illuminates his story by setting it in the context of historical events and big economic ideas. And he is assiduous in explaining the links between what decision-makers are doing and what’s happening in the markets, between events in the rich world and those in emerging markets, between geopolitics and the global economy ... Instant histories are rarely successful, but the world is unlikely to be treated to a better account of the economics of the pandemic than the central section of Tooze’s book. Anybody who is curious about how the thing was managed should read it; anybody who wants to know how to turn a technical subject into thrilling writing should learn from it.
Nicholas Shaxson
Mixed The Times (UK) The book’s principal virtue springs from Shaxson’s skill in unpicking the complexity of the system and explaining it in layman’s terms. He takes the reader by the hand and leads them through bank capital requirements, special purpose vehicles, credit-default swaps and the other derivatives that were one of the main causes of the great crash — in more detail, although with fewer bubbles, than Margot Robbie did in her bathtub in The Big Short ... Shaxson also does an excellent job of fingering the regulatory laxity of the City of London ... While many of Shaxson’s charges are well-aimed and hit their target, as the book gathers pace it widens its angle of attack to spray bullets at pretty much all the usual Spartist targets ... The tone switches from one of journalistic probing to that of a conspiracy theorist whose fingers are typing too fast for his brain ... Some readers, no doubt, will regard the invective as a strength rather than a weakness. Polemics suit a populist era. Shaxson’s book will no doubt sell very well as a bible for Corbynistas, but it risks putting off those who are looking for enlightenment, rather than to have their prejudices confirmed. Which is a shame, because there is a great deal of well reported, well argued stuff in it.