About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Bob Woodward
Positive The Washington Post \"...reducing the book to scoops trivializes Woodward’s ambitions for this sprawling, occasionally blinkered but timely book. If the nuggets were the meal, then the headlines would make the book itself redundant ... a reader who understands these perspectives can adjust for any slants the sources may seek to provide. And even if most of the sources Woodward spoke to for the book are residents or friends of Bidenworld, he is too good a writer and too experienced an observer to let the book’s lessons be dictated by his sources ... One might criticize the relative absence of attention in “War” to Gazans and Palestinians more generally. Atrocities committed against Israelis receive extensive attention (and the details are genuinely horrific and gut-wrenching), while the terror and toll of the conflict in Gaza are abstracted, intellectualized. The Biden team and the Israeli government are shown to be in constant communication: Netanyahu appears on more pages of the book than Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secretary Austin combined. Palestinian voices are absent ... If War is somewhat didactic, even pedantic, about the value of good policymaking, it is because it thrums with the urgency Woodward must feel of persuading the electorate not to make the same mistake — or a worse one — again.\
Alan Philps
Positive The Washington Post Philps clearly wants The Red Hotel to do justice to those who served truth and mete out some punishment to those who failed it. The book’s structure somewhat hinders this ambition. It awkwardly jumps between past, present and future, and from one set of interpreters and journalists to another ... The other challenge that Philps faces is historical. A longtime foreign correspondent with experience in the Soviet Union and Russia, Philps has ably reconstructed the different stories and settings of the Metropol. Yet he also seems to aspire to say more about the role of truth and translation in wartime ... Philps’s book does, however, raise questions about how audiences should interpret news about contemporary conflicts ... Philps is also clear-eyed enough to show that truth will not always come out — at least, not easily, and not without cost.