About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
David A. Bell
Rave The Guardian (UK) Bell, a distinguished historian of France, is alive to the tension between revolutionary ideologies of freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity and the violence and repression that can be unleashed in their name ... witty and elegant, a series of deft interlocking biographies. Although Bell is too disciplined a historian to compress the 18th into the 21st century, the book seems shaped by sorrow at the cruelty and stupidity of the Trump presidency, as it comes to an end during the global pandemic. Moreover, in response to invocations of \'Enlightenment\' as a one-dimensional synonym for secularism and technocracy, Bell shows that the age of revolutions has a living legacy in rightwing demagoguery as much as in ecumenical liberalism ... The book also resonates in the awful present, when politicians are celebrities and self-fashioning on social media is constant, dispiriting, uncompensated labour.
Toby Green
Positive The Guardian (UK) In A Fistful of Shells, the historian Toby Green dismantles the racist myth of west African \'backwardness.\' He shows that the inequalities that made the European \'scramble for Africa” possible grew out of a catastrophe, the path to which began in the 15th century ... A Fistful of Shells is an antidote to these histories, and to the master narrative of Africa as historical object, rather than subject.
James Walvin
Mixed The Guardian The book is an informative history of sugar’s rise from a luxury to a staple, and its ubiquity in modern diets. But in connecting the history of slavery and sugar to the history of sugar’s effect on global health in the 21st century, Walvin relies on the idea of \'corruption\' to carry his argument. He has fallen hard for juxtaposing dead teeth and abscessed gums rotted by sugar with the moral corruption of slavery and corporate influence on public life. In the process, he becomes so distracted by bodies—toothless bodies, whipped bodies, fat bodies—that he cannot keep pace with the increasing complexity and deepening inequality of the world sugar helped to make ... he indulges in a stereotype of the U.S. as a nation of the fat, the stupid and the vulgar ... The book ends, then, with an account of social and economic forces, but invoked not to explain how sugar helped to make global capitalism, but to scold its most vulnerable victims.
Ron Chernow
Positive The Guardian ...as Ron Chernow argues in his new biography, Grant has suffered in public memory. His drinking – notorious in his lifetime – dominates his legacy, while his achievements as a soldier and as a politician have been dismissed ... This is biography by attrition. Across nearly 1,000 pages, Chernow argues for his subject’s greatness ... Against the claim that Grant was a mediocre general, Chernow portrays him as a talented administrator ... Chernow has an instinct for redemption. He picks out Grant’s efforts for enslaved people during the war, and for newly enfranchised people afterwards ... Grant’s personal redemption did not equate to the redemption of the American republic.