About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Steven Wright
Positive The New York Times Book Review A strange and wonderful book ... Readers looking for a page-turner may not enjoy Harold, but for those seeking a page-lingerer, there is much to digest. There were times, however, when I found my attention wandering, particularly during a chapters-long dream sequence, when I wished to return to the classroom in the hopes that something would happen ... Harold’s brain certainly goes fast, faster even than the fastest Quicksandpiper. Take a sniff.
Isaac Fitzgerald
Positive The New York Times Book Review Fitzgerald nestles comfortably on a bar stool beside writers like Kerouac, Bukowski, Richard Price and Pete Hamill. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a book by and for hard-drinking but softhearted men like these, and for those who take voyeuristic pleasure in their ne’er-do-well ways ... He writes about the bar with an affection that surpasses any he has for his former lovers, most of whom go nameless in the book ... aside from his mother and a porn producer and actress named Princess Donna, women are hardly mentioned in Dirtbag, Massachusetts; the action is nearly all centered on the doings of men. That’s not necessarily a criticism. The book’s charm is in its telling of male misbehavior and, occasionally, the things we men get right. The fights nearly all come with forgiveness. It is about the ways men struggle to make sense of themselves and the romance men too often find in the bottom of a bottle of whiskey. If you’re looking for a book about what’s wrong and right with American men, you could do a lot worse than Dirtbag, Massachusetts ... There is much sin in Fitzgerald’s confessional, although none of it mortal. Instead, it is an endearing and tattered catalog of one man’s transgressions and the ways in which it is our sins, far more than our virtues, that make us who we are.
Daniel Kunitz
Mixed The New York Times Book Review The story becomes dry in places...And only true weight lifting devotees will find the history of late-19th-­century German gyms edifying. More successful are Kunitz’s portraits of the eccentrics who challenged dogma to push sometimes-eccentric notions of fitness and how best to achieve it ... Lift works best when it stays personal, as when Kunitz recounts his own entry into what he calls the “new frontier” of exercise.
William Giraldi
Positive The New York Times Book Review Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love ... Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength.