About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Beth Macy
Positive San Francisco Chronicle ...a book that is a scorching indictment of American greed and indifference ... Macy reports on the human carnage with respect and quiet compassion, but it is gut-check reading.
Radley Balko & Tucker Carrington
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle The book’s authors have been working the West/Hayne beat for years...and the result is a careful and forceful reckoning. However low your estimation of the U.S. legal system, this book will take it lower ... The book opens with a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: \'Our society has a high degree of confidence in its criminal trials, in no small part because the Constitution offers unparalleled protections against convicting the innocent.\' The authors spend the next 300 pages chipping away at this confidence, though their own efforts have begun to repair some of the damage.
Francisco Cantú
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle \"If the book ended in 2012, when Cantú left the Border Patrol, it would have been an enlightening but ultimately flawed work. Getting closer to a subject doesn’t always make it clearer, and if there is clarity, it can be the clarity that comes from seeing only a slice of the subject: step to the left or right, and the view dramatically changes. On the job, he sees many migrants but knows none, and they blur together to become yet another abstraction ... The final and most powerful section of the book occurs away from the border, when Cantú, now a graduate student and coffee barista, befriends José, an undocumented groundskeeper.\
Dave Eggers
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle There’s a lot about coffee in this book, most of it exquisitely interesting, from the challenges of becoming a Q grader — a sort of sommelier for coffee — to the kopi luwak, a coffee made by beans that have been eaten and excreted by a catlike creature in Sumatra. Eggers previously considered himself 'a casual coffee drinker and a great skeptic of specialty coffee,' and he tells the story of the bean with a novice’s excitement, bringing a perspective of wonder and attention to detail that vibrates — to use his word — on the page ... Alkhanshali’s story will no doubt be hailed as quintessentially American — the dream made real — as a counter to the current wave of Islamophobia and immigrant bashing. But that’s really chauvinism of a different sort. This is about the human capacity to dream — here, there, everywhere.
David Grann
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Some of this history have been told before, though not by someone with the graceful touch of Grann. His attention to the craft of writing is matched by his obsessive research — really, the only sort of research that matters ... In the third and final section, Grann visits the reservation, in what will be one of several trips. This is when Killers of the Flower Moon shifts from a solid book into a revelatory experience. There will be no spoilers here. Let it simply be said that not everything was as it appeared to be. Alas, it was worse.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Rave Newsday ...extraordinary for its consistent empathy and the attention it pays to the emotional terrain of politics. It is billed as a book for this moment, but it will endure ... Why do these smart and compassionate people — and many of the people Hochschild interviews are clearly both — support Trump? If that’s a question you’ve asked, Hochschild’s book is the perfect place to start. Without caricature or condescension, she has shared their world with us.
Adam Hochschild
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle After reading Hochschild’s book, it’s impossible to feel anything but admiration — and awe — at the bravery of Americans such as Berg, and deep disappointment that our country betrayed both them and the Spanish people.
Matthew Desmond
Rave San Francisco Chronicle Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty. Desmond makes a convincing case that policymakers and academics have overlooked the role of the private rental market, and that eviction 'is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty'... Evictions have become routine. Desmond’s book should begin to change that.