About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Salman Rushdie
Positive The Atlantic The subject—the idea for which Rushdie nearly died—is the freedom to say what he wants. It’s under as much pressure today as ever—from fanatics of every type, governments, corporations, the right, the left, and the indifferent. Rushdie survived, but he has too many scars to be certain that the idea will. This book is his way of fighting back.
Adam Hochschild
Positive Atlantic [Hochschild\'s] talent for characterization and storytelling serves him here in portraits of little-known figures ... Hochschild’s books are concerned with social justice, and he doesn’t paint in moral shades of gray. Wilson was the most complex and enigmatic of presidents—idealistic and harsh, cold and passionate, liberal and bigoted, arrogant and self-doubting. Here he comes across as merely authoritarian ... Wilson, thus flattened, drains the story of its tragic irony and some of its more interesting implications.
Jonathan Martin
Rave The Atlantic It’s a document of decline and fall—a chronicle that should cause future readers to ponder how American leaders in the early 21st century lost the ability and will to govern...Step back from the page-by-page account of congressional Republicans’ desperate grasping for Donald Trump’s favor or the Biden administration’s struggle to pass its legislative agenda: You’re confronted with a world of almost unrelieved cowardice, cynicism, myopia, narcissism, and ineptitude, where the overriding motive is the pursuit of power for its own sake...It’s rare that a politician thinks about any cause higher than self-interest...The book’s Democrats are at least sane, but they’re beset by petty quarrels, forever trying to solve the \'identity politics’ Rubik’s cube,\' and dragged down by a pervasive exhaustion; their elderly leaders are unable to grasp the brutal political forces swirling around them...The Republicans are hell-bent on the destruction of American democracy, or else too craven to stand in the way—the result is the same...Each party has a handful of impressive young politicians, but because they take governing seriously, they’re probably doomed to obscurity or defeat...The failures of the book’s Democrats do not threaten the republic...The rotten core around which our democracy has begun to collapse is the Republican Party...It remains Trump’s party as long as he keeps his grip on its voters and can defy the medical odds against an old man who eats badly and never exercises...This Will Not Pass raises a question that isn’t easy to answer: What is it about political power that leads people to desecrate themselves so nakedly in its pursuit?
Madison Smartt Bell
Positive The Atlantic In books that deserve to endure, Stone anticipates the present in surprising, unsettling ways ... compulsively readable but reliant almost exclusively on Stone and his wife as sources.
Dorian Lynskey
Positive The Atlantic The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984...makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwell’s entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world ...The biographical story of 1984—the dying man’s race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, off Scotland—will be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskey’s contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to live ... Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album, imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you.
Phil Klay
Rave The New Yorker The best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America’s recent wars is Phil Klay’s Redeployment, a masterly collection of short stories about war and its psychological consequences … His fiction is extremely funny and absolutely serious, his control over language and character so assured that the array of first-person narrators in these dozen stories—combat grunts, a desk-bound officer, a beleaguered State Department official, a Marine chaplain—are all distinct and persuasive. Klay writes with a powerful restraint about the inversion of normal reality called combat, its permanent effects on bodies and souls, but the best stories in Redeployment look at war from a slight distance.
Michael V. Hayden
Pan The New Yorker Playing to the Edge suffers from the usual problems of the official memoir. All autobiographies are self-serving, but those of public figures tend to be unapologetically so ... Hayden devotes far more energy to answering critical coverage in the Times and the Washington Post than to analyzing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Daniel Oppenheimer
Positive The New Yorker This is Oppenheimer’s first book, but he writes with the assurance and historical command of someone who has been thinking about his topic for a long time. The colors of his own flag are hard to discern, which makes him a reliable guide.