About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jonathan Haidt
Positive The Times (UK) I realised in the end that I didn’t need Haidt to prove causation. Of all the likely causes — existential or economic gloom, something in the water — this seems the frontrunner.
Alexa Hagerty
Rave The Times (UK) One team of grave detectives told Hagerty that it takes a month per body to exhume and analyse: a doomed race against time ... But slowly, this book makes the case for such work ... Hagerty’s time in this particular well is the most awfully compelling part of the book. She descended into \'an ancient underworld, like Hades\' ... You might think the subject of this sensitive and thought-provoking book is of niche interest but, as Ukraine should remind us, it is still troublingly resonant.
Hayley Campbell
Rave The Times (UK) Each chapter is like a self-contained magazine piece with an excellent cast of characters. How perfect that there is a master embalmer working in Margate called Dr Gore! Each essay varies in tone and interest, but each provides shocking information, supported by kind, emotional sophistication. Campbell doesn’t have an axe to grind like, say, Jessica Mitford in The American Way of Death the classic exposé of corrupt funeral practices. She just wants us, as it were, to see the axe ... All these details feel exploitative now that I have pulled them from the body of the book, but in the whole they feel morally grounded ... The book’s tour de force is the chapter on the technicians who prepare bodies for autopsy at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. It is a superlative piece of writing, one of the best essays I have read in a long time; provocative, loving and profound ... To the essential jobs working in the death industry should be added: tour guide.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Rave The Times (UK) Adichie does not reach for a narrative. She cannot force sense on the senseless. She writes diary-style (but deeply crafted) entries about the violence of loss ... For fans of the famously private Adichie — she deferred news that she had become a mother until well after the birth — this is fascinatingly intimate. It is also delivered in the most readable, tender bites for any of the many of us whose attention has been shot by the harrowing of this past year.