About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Ayad Akhtar
Positive Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The reactions of this novel\'s American Muslim characters to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are too complex and subtle to summarize in a sentence, but I think it\'s fair to quote Ayad\'s thought that they emerged from the tragedy \'at once suspects and victims\' ... he digs deeply into internecine cultural conflicts, and into the perplexing condition of being slotted by outsiders into a stereotypical religious pigeonhole while not being so observant about that religion ... Readers who have not seen his play Junk or who think of Akhtar only as a chronicler of Muslim Americans, may be surprised by the intensity of his critique of corrosive capitalism ... an embrace of a complicated and difficult patrimony, personal and cultural.
Alex Kotlowitz
Positive Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"... gut-wrenching and heartbreaking ... Kotlowitz listens [to many peoples\' stories] with compassion to dozens of affected people, bringing them alive in fluid prose ... Kotlowitz can\'t resolve [certain arguments]. But his book makes these abstract questions personal.\
Joanne B. Freeman
Positive Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"As historian Joanne B. Freeman recounts in The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War, representatives and senators frequently assailed each other\'s manhood and menaced each other with bodily harm ... To oversimplify her book, which is based on a close reading of primary documents from the 1830s until the Civil War, Freeman sees this violence as rooted in Southern honor culture and defensiveness about slavery ... The Field of Blood seconds a broader point... [w]hile historical events, such as the outcomes of the American Revolution and the Civil War, may seem preordained to us now, they certainly were not to people living in those times. Nineteenth-century congressmen making those honor challenges, or sidestepping them, were weighing unknowns as they sought to advance their interests, stay electable and preserve the Union.\
Michelle Dean
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"In a happy case of it takes one to know one, Michelle Dean has delivered a penetrating book about penetrating American writers ... Dean serves one incisive sentence after another ... At the same time, Dean respects her literary foremothers enough to examine the foibles, difficulties and weaknesses underneath those fearsome personas.\
Dave Eggers
Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel There's a long list of people for whom I would enthusiastically recommend Dave Eggers' The Monk of Mokha, his nonfiction chronicle of Mokhtar's success: people who love coffee, because the book is filled with fascinating details on the subject; people from Yemen; fans of Eggers' writing, of course; and in particular, anyone who has ever dreamed of starting a business, especially an international one … In the story's climactic pages, Mokhtar has to find his way out of war-ravaged Yemen with precious coffee samples destined for a trade show that could make or break his financing...Incredibly, Mokhtar, with help he acknowledges from so many people, made his dream reality.
Helen Smith
Rave The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel I heartily recommend Helen Smith's new biography An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius … Her biography makes clear that Garnett saw his first loyalty as to literature and its writers, not the publishers who paid him. He didn't hesitate to recommend a writer take a book to a different house … Garnett had a gift for nudging writers in more ambitious directions. Smith compliments ‘Edward's ability to 'talk' a book into being, a skill he employed to some effect throughout his career, adapting his approach to the temperament of the protege, reassuring the timid, cajoling the reluctant and bellowing at the bloody-minded.’
Scott Kelly
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Endurance satisfies a reader's curiosity about daily life on the space station, down to the challenges of eating and going to the bathroom while floating ...writes about space station colleagues with respect and affection...Kelly reminds us how much astronauts and cosmonauts depend on each other...his book is 'not just about flying in space. It's about this kid who couldn't do his homework or pay attention getting motivated and having some pretty incredible opportunities.'
Anthony DeCurtis
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Lou Reed: A Life is a biography, not a detailed critical study of Reed's music. In context, DeCurtis offers some evaluations. I don't agree with them all. For example, I think DeCurtis is too kind to Lulu (2011), Reed's dreadful collaboration with Metallica. But Reed's musical path was a messy, complicated one. Diehard fans often disagree on the merits of individual recordings. Through his reporting and judicious writing, DeCurtis does a quality job of illuminating Reed's challenging, artistic life.
Julie Otsuka
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel In depicting the lives of Japanese picture brides who came to the United States in the early 1900s, novelist Julie Otsuka might have invented three women, alike and different, and braided their tales together. Instead, with great daring and spectacular success, she has woven countless stories gleaned from her research into a chorus of the women's voices, speaking their collective experience in a plural ‘we,’ while incorporating the wide range of their individual lives. The Buddha in the Attic moves forward in waves of experiences, like movements in a musical composition … By its end, Otsuka's book has become emblematic of the brides themselves: slender and serene on the outside, tough, weathered and full of secrets on the inside.
Kate Atkinson
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Kate Atkinson's novel A God in Ruins imagines the long life that Teddy lives after the war, into his 90s, with both the heartaches and the changes those decades bring. American readers will naturally think of Teddy as one of the Greatest Generation, those World War II vets who fought heroically and never wanted to talk about their service … While Atkinson granted Ursula 17 or more lives in the temporally tricky Life After Life, she limits Teddy to a single long one in A God in Ruins, though she moves deftly back and forth through his life span. In compelling scenes, she captures the routine and the tedium of a bomber pilot's life, punctuated by random moments of airborne terror.
Finn Murphy
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The Long Haul can be read and enjoyed as an adventure story and as a peek into an occupation whose practitioners we see rolling down the highway ... Murphy is a pointed social critic. Bedbugging (trucker slang for movers) gives him a diagonal view of American life. Murphy scoffs at misty notions of truckers as 18-wheel cowboys.
Kate Atkinson
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel In Life After Life, Ursula keeps re-spawning after each death, eventually gaining some ability to return to life at a key checkpoint and make a different choice ... Her lives through the interwar years and the Blitz of London demonstrate how narrow women\'s roles and options could be then, but smart, pretty and determined, she makes her way ...Atkinson writes that it is about \'not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imagination\' ... Playfully, she also threads the novel with grace notes about choices and time, such as allowing Ursula to buy the yellow party dress in one life that she denied herself in an earlier one.
Edwidge Danticat
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ... the way she engages her subject makes this a book almost everyone can appreciate ... A strength of Danticat's book is the way she moves back and forth between her life and literary texts, using one to understand the other and vice versa ... In The Art of Death, Danticat writes clearly and judiciously about a subject that is challenging for both writers and people to face directly. Her range and grasp of literary references is wide and powerful; she certainly turned me on to books I didn't know before, such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's One Amazing Thing. The final prayer she wrote in Manman's voice may bring both tears and laughter to anyone who has lost a mother.
Jaimy Gordon
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Both richly literary and red-blooded in its depictions of the sporting life, Lord of Misrule gives readers several compelling races, including a completely unexpected but fitting finale. A reader doesn't have to be a horse player to enjoy the novel, but a horse player who can handle Gordon's technique just might … Gordon, whose earlier fiction leans poetic and experimental, brings a passion for word choice and point-of-view shifting to the dark corners of the stables. Beyond the brilliant character monikers, she's pretty good at resonant horse names, too: Little Spinoza, Pelter and the titular Lord of Misrule."4
Sherman Alexie
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel His new memoir mixes short prose chapters with related poems. In both modes, he's compulsively readable, a literary writer with the guts of a stand-up comedian ... In piecing together his mother's history from the stories she told him and his siblings (and more than once he refers to her as a liar), Alexie concludes that both she and another family member were children of rape, leading to some of his soberest, open-ended reflections on how mothers would feel about children born from those incidents.
Don Lee
Positive The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Lee's novel shares some of the character of alt-country music, low-key and trafficking in folks who will never be gold-card members. Deftly, he finds gentle comedy in the town's tiny Unitarian Universalist congregation while also respecting the impulses that brought them together ... While the modest Park would blush if he heard me say this, Lonesome Lies Before Us is also a novel about art, and about what Samuel Beckett called the 'itch to make' even when all of the possible rewards of making have been stripped away.
Roxane Gay
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Hunger is also a brave book because it fits no preconceived template. 'This is not a weight-loss memoir,' she writes early on. The arc of Gay's story is toward greater physical and emotional health, but it is a slow one, not the crisis-and-conversion tale of a stereotypical recovery memoir ... it succeeds in illuminating the painful Cartesian predicament of the very overweight person: Am I this body, or am I separate from it? Do I have to love this body that causes me pain today before it can change to a body I love more?
Sara Paretsky
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Paretsky's tale of a big-city private investigator who turns a small town inside out put me in mind of Dashiell Hammett's classic Red Harvest. But here's a key difference: Hammett's Continental Op deliberately sets out to tear the burg apart. Warshawski's destabilizing magic is just the byproduct of the convoluted thread she keeps yanking — and of her passion for the underdog ... In contrast to loner private eyes of yore, Warshawski is a thoroughly related person who relies on a network of friends and helpers, and who finds time to care for her animal while saving the world. She balances old-fashioned door-knocking gumshoeing with DNA swabs and paid databases. She's also a person who listens to the voices of the elderly, the mentally ill and the often ignored. There's no sign that she'll run out of work any time soon.
Harper Lee
Mixed The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel It's not a sequel to but readers will struggle not to read it like one. It also is not a very good novel. Written by an unknown rather than Harper Lee, it would never have been published. For its publisher to claim that Watchman 'stands as a magnificent novel in its own right' is cynical and gets me wondering, cynically, who will spend the profits generated by it. Nonetheless, Watchman is worth reading as a historical and literary artifact. It's the kind of manuscript, like James Joyce's Stephen Hero, that often emerges after a writer's death — a first grappling with subjects and themes that a powerful writer later sculpts into a masterpiece.
John Waters
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...a commencement address I consumed with joy, will likely read again and would be happy to give to young people — especially brooding, complicated young people. (Yes, you.) Its pleasures are enhanced by playful typography and droll, sketchy illustrations by Eric Hanson ... Like Hairspray, Make Trouble fulfills its genre expectations while also gloriously subverting them.
Elizabeth Strout
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Neither novel nor linked story collection strikes me as adequate terms to describe this book's ingenious structure, in which characters reappear in each other's stories. In a few cases, we experience remarkable encounters from different points of view in different stories ... Strout's sentence style fits these Midwestern folks and tales: straightforward while also seeming effortlessly lyrical, seeded both with humor and bitterness like many of our days.
Amy Goldstein
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel She deftly introduces and follows a cross-section of affected autoworkers and their families, community members and leaders through the years, writing in present tense to heighten the immediacy of their challenges and responses ... Like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, Goldstein's Janesville offers many reminders that many working Americans are only one or two bad breaks and decisions away from disaster.
Sarah Manguso
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Her biting collection of aphorisms merits a wide audience, especially of people taking life on the Mithridates plan of self-inoculation against the world's toxins. But be forewarned that Manguso's bracing words often suggest those toxins are self-generated ... She offers a master class in a specific strain of desire: envy, the (often resentful) longing to have what someone else has. To rip off a Chris Hedges title, for Manguso sometimes envy is a force that gives her life meaning ... My field test for writing like this: Does it produce a rueful inner smile or shudder of recognition? Manguso's arguments do so many times.
George Saunders
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...a brilliant, empathetic and wonderfully weird novel, both emotionally and technically stirring ... In between bardo scenes, Saunders intersperses short quotes from memoirs and contemporary accounts of Willie's death, President Lincoln's grief, and how both were viewed by their contemporaries (often harshly). These provide enriching detail and context, but also reinforce the novel's theme of faulty perception: President Lincoln's contemporaries can't even agree on what color his eyes were.
Cixin Liu, Trans. by Ken Liu
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"...a trilogy that belongs in the pantheon with the greatest works of Arthur C. Clarke, one of Liu\'s self-declared precursors. Liu offers brain-busting thrills for the reader who thrives on hard-science speculation, but has plenty of love for the troubled human conscience, too ... I recommend it to you.\
Mary Robinette Kowal
Positive The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...creat[es] a world different enough from ours to be fresh but close enough to this one to feel real ... Kowal also takes on, at times pugnaciously, the classism, sexism and racism of the British Army brass of that time period ... I'd welcome the chance to learn more about Stuyvesant's past and see what use she might make of her gift in the future.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Whitehead threads this alternative reality ingeniously through this otherwise realistic and often harrowing novel ... Whitehead never flinches in portraying the worst elements of the slave experience and the accompanying racist language. He also delineates many secondary and tertiary characters so crisply that I never had to stop to figure out or remember who was who. Whitehead's book is a novel, not an op-ed. But I can't help feeling that it also communicates a message for today: The Underground Railroad is still under construction. Keep swinging your pickax.
Alejandro Zambra, Trans. by Megan McDowell
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel While committing these metafictional and postmodern pranks, Zambra also crisply fictionalizes romantic and parental woes and mocks hypocritical Chilean society ... Based on the outcome of Multiple Choice, Zambra is superbly equipped to major in writing fiction about the unhappiness of human beings, with secondary concentrations in lampooning hypocrisy and satirizing repression. I recommend you admit him to your reading list immediately.
Yaa Gyasi
Rave The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Gyasi has captured that feeling of time in a novel that dramatizes the consequences of slavery and the African diaspora from 18th-century Ghana through contemporary America in graceful prose that never wastes a word ... Gyasi writes with empathy for her characters and judicious restraint in her style. Even so, many lines demand to be savored ... A generation later, a different teacher urges Yaw's bookworm daughter to find books that 'she could feel inside of her.' For many readers, Homegoing will be one of those books.
Ken Liu
Rave The Philadelphia Inquirer To call [Liu's] book one of the best collections of speculative fiction I've ever read is simply to begin my praise. Liu's book compiles brilliant stories written in several different, overlapping modes, a technically dazzling collection of compulsively readable narratives, presenting characters with agonizing moral dilemmas and never forgetting the heart.