About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Oliver Sacks
Positive The Telegraph (UK) These well-edited letters, with their brief but useful footnotes, will only add to his lustre. Although they sometimes show the rhetoric, extravagance and self-pity Gunn deplored in Sacks, they also show the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship and his real genius for describing people and natural phenomena.
Hugh Bonneville
Positive The Telegraph (UK) He is markedly discreet about his personal life ... He comes over as a sunny soul ... On the cover, Oldman hails this book as \'Beautiful. Touching. And funny.\' I agree.
Frances Wilson
Rave Friday (UAE) Every page, almost every paragraph, of this book is exciting (except some of the digressions on Dante). Wilson complains that many biographies feel like plodding across a vast flat plain, whereas she is never afraid to dart off into the bushes, chasing intriguing characters wherever she finds them ... If you want a cool, dispassionate biography, this is not it. Wilson writes as a fan. She worships her hero and then gets furious when he lets her down. At times she seems to be almost channelling Lawrence, especially in her landscape descriptions, which are as good as Lawrence’s own. Burning Man had the effect of making me want to reread Lawrence, which I have not done for years, and also to look out for anything else Frances Wilson writes.
Christopher Hitchens
Mixed The Sunday Times Hitch-22 sparkles with funny stories, treasurable quotations, witty apercus and deft descriptions. Why then did I find myself reading it with increasing distrust and eventually, I have to say, distaste? ... Hitch admits right at the end that Hitch-22 is “a highly selective narrative”. It is indeed — and it is the stuff he leaves out that worries me ... But the biggest lacuna in the book is women. Apart from the long opening chapter about his mother, we barely encounter another woman for the next 400 pages, which is odd given Hitch’s reputation as a Don Juan.
Tina Turner
Mixed The Sunday Times \"Turner does seem nice from this autobiography, but it is so heavily ghosted that you never get a sense of her real voice. ... I’m sure her fans will love it, but it is a pity her style is not as exciting as her life.\
Michael Ovitz
Mixed The Times UK By the mid-1980s, Michael Ovitz boasts, he was the most feared man in Hollywood: \'I was a control freak. A shape-shifting machine. A Terminator.\' ... Given what a huge name he once was, it is surprising how little is known about him, but he always believed that \'mystique was better than publicity\' and rarely gave interviews. He claims in this memoir that he was a perfectly normal, laid-back young man until he arrived in Hollywood, but that seems unlikely ... He spent 15 years designing and building his dream home in Beverly Hills to house his art — it would be \'a miniature MoMA with bedrooms\' — but \'The worst day of all was the day I moved in, because then it was done.\' He still owns the old CAA office designed by IM Pei that he was so proud of building, but when he recently revisited it, empty, \'It felt small.\' The same might be said of him. But we can conclude, at least, that this book is mostly honest, and therefore a useful contribution to the history of Hollywood, because it is so self-damaging.
Penny Junor
Pan The Times It’s a plodding biography of the Duchess of Cornwall containing almost no new material. What is new is the tone of out and out hagiography. This is an airbrushed Camilla with absolutely no warts at all.