About Book Marks
Gal Beckerman Gal Beckerman is an author and journalist. Currently an editor at The New York Times Book Review, he has worked at The Forward and the Columbia Journalism Review and written for many publications, including The Washington Post, New Republic and Wall Street Journal. He is the author of When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, a history of the Soviet Jewry movement. He can be found on Twitter @galbeckerman
Recent Reviews
Alexei Navalny
Rave The Atlantic The chance to hear his own written voice, to spend serious time with him (nearly 500 pages), only reinforces this impression, along with the pain of having lost him ... Who else but someone with such reserves of fortitude, with such a sense of self, with such an ability to laugh but also believe, would be able to withstand such indignity, such mental torture? He allowed himself, his actual body, to represent another kind of Russia, a freer country. And he did so knowing that he might never actually ever see it with his own eyes.
Richard Beck
Pan The Atlantic Exhaustive ... Beck’s book itself can be read as an artifact ... This is history as a skipping record. It leaves little room for ethical development over time ... This is the left’s familiar catechism. Beck presents it as revelatory, but it comes off as tedious ... His rejection of politics, his desire to rip it all out from the root, the Manichaean way he has come to see America as a force of darkness, the sense that only through the most \'disruptive substance\' will a better world emerge—all of this, too, is a legacy of September 11.
Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann
Rave The Atlantic Her most directly personal ... In the stifling world of Kairos, passion and intimacy are entangled with self-abasement and suspicion, and history crowds its way in too ... Erpenbeck also dramatizes the collision of East and West ... There is no narrative neatness here, no methodical sifting of all this dirt. What these American works do, what Erpenbeck does so well, is instead make room for a history that can’t be reckoned with—a too-tidy phrase—but needs to be recognized and stirred up again and again.
Rutu Modan, tr. Ishai Mishory
Rave The New York Times Tunnels Modan’s newest book, is also her most overtly political, though at first it doesn’t appear so ... by Page 55, Modan has us visually slam right into the gray concrete slabs that make up the separation wall skirting the occupied Palestinian territories ... Modan never stops being entertaining and drawing on genre — in this case, an absurd \'Seven Samurai\' plot — as Nili pulls together a motley crew for the job, including a bunch of goofy young settlers and a Palestinian man named Mahdi whom she met on childhood digs with her father ... It’s a mix of motives that leads to near disaster, but also shows the ways Modan understands her part of the world: a place that must learn to better live with the friction of competing narratives.
Yishai Sarid, Trans by Yardenne Greenspan
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... a brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present ... Translated from the Hebrew with a steady hand by Yardenne Greenspan ... Sarid is clearly very scared for Israel. The allegorical rhythms beat too loudly here to ignore. Other writers have described well the reverberations of trauma but few have taken this further step, to wonder out loud about the ways the Holocaust may have warped the collective conscience of a nation, making every moment existential, a constant panic not to become victims again.
Akiko Busch
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"... Busch offers [a field guide for invisibility], roaming from essay to essay in a loose, associative style, following invisibility where it takes her — from childhood and the comfort of imaginary friends to middle age and the feeling of disappearing as a sexual object: a sensation, she argues, that can form the basis of a new, and positive, form of selfhood ... Inconspicuousness can be powerful — this may be Busch’s most radical point, especially at a moment when we’re conditioned to think power means yelling louder than everyone else in your Twitter feed, or showing the world on Instagram how you’re living your best life.\
Jane Brox
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"... Brox hunkers down in two institutions dominated by the absence of noise — prison and the monastery — and leaves us with a much more ambiguous sense of silence: oppressive under certain conditions, liberating under others ... Brox writes beautifully about the silence woven through daily tasks and between prayers in the medieval monastery, its varying qualities and duration...\
Edward Tenner
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The dehumanizing effects of big data are well known and Tenner adds no groundbreaking insight here ... But what Tenner brings is a new frame. Unlike critiquing the denizens of Silicon Valley for deepening social and economic inequality, destroying our brains or helping to undermine democratic norms (issues that seem to matter to us more than them), questioning efficiency is truly kicking the geeks where it hurts ... His recommendations are sensible, if hard to imagine actually coming to pass. He wants us to spend more time in the physical world, in the \'terrain\' of our cities or between the paragraphs of a printed book. We need to get a little lost ... If this sounds like Tenner is a man impassioned, I should be clearer: This is no manifesto. There is not much blood flowing through this book, which reads more like a report issued by a concerned think tank. Maybe it’s just that preaching moderation doesn’t lend itself to writing that pulls your face to the page.
Will Storr
Mixed The New Republic Despite the digital wink of the title, this is a story that arrives at Silicon Valley only in its second to last chapter. As he sets out to reverse engineer that ridiculous face I make into my phone, he finds it to be the result of a long historical process. It is 2,500 years of culture layered on top of biology that have determined this need to selfie. Aristotle, Jesus, Freud, Ayn Rand and the Esalen Institute are to blame—much more than Steve Jobs ... Storr wants to tell a clean story. His claims can, as a result, often feel overblown. It’s just as reductionist to state that individualism can be traced back to the craggy geography of Greece or that the notion of self-esteem originated from wacky happenings at an institute sitting on the cliffs of Big Sur as it is to blame Facebook for a chronic lack of empathy in young people. His historical tour is pretty loosey goosey, skipping over, for example, the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the rise of democracy, and, yes, the impact of technology on communication from the telegraph until today. All this too helped chisel the contours of the modern self. But for Storr the story comes down to a few cherry-picked facts from biology, culture and economics. It seems possible to say on every page, \'yes, but\' ... Until Google or Amazon invents an app for solving the problem of mortality, I think we’ll all remain humbled enough.
Ed. by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The result is an exhausting collection of essays. And with a few strong exceptions — like the pieces by Dave Eggers, Rachel Kushner and Waldman herself — they are what you might expect: fairly superficial, full of unearned authority and exhibitionist empathy. A parachute job. But maybe because they are impressionistic and repetitive — staring out the window of a moving car at walls and checkpoints and then more walls and checkpoints — the essays do convey something of the state of the occupation at half-century. The accumulation of similar details, deeply etched marks of subjugation, don’t inspire shock and alarm so much as a sense of gray permanence, like watching concrete hardening.
Hala Alyan
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"[Alyan’s] book covers four generations of the Yacoub family, starting in 1963 and ending in the present, each chapter from a different perspective. If this sometimes makes the book feel scattered, more like a series of connected set pieces, the long duration has the advantage of illustrating the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter … Only when she goes to Jaffa does she have a cathartic evening that ends with her writing the names of her family members on the wet sand, then watching them quickly erased.\
Michael Chabon
Positive The New Republic And there is something contrived—Forrest Gumpish—in the way the character always gives Chabon an opportunity to introduce exciting factoids of 20th century history ... What elevates it all is the figure of Chabon’s grandmother, a charismatic manic depressive whose erratic behavior give[s] the book humanity ... this is a memoir about grandparents that so fully complicates the notion that their lives are the prepackaged, finished objects they always seem to be by the time we encounter them.
Matti Friedman
Positive The New York Times Book Review The collective portrait puts Pumpkinflowers on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried — its Israeli analog.
Timonthy Snyder
Mixed New Republic When [Snyder] reaches beyond the how—the conditions for mass killing—to the why, the ability to flip morality and kill neighbors, it all seems too clean.