About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Caroline Alexander
Positive New York Journal of Books The author tells, through a clear and engaging narrative, the story from the pilots in the planes to the level of campaign overview ... A thorough, but never dull, history for the reader curious about the reality of World War II, including enough facts, personalities, and names to make this history whole.
Wayne Kalayjian
Positive New York Journal of Books Kalayjian keeps suspense in his entertaining story in telling what might have otherwise been a dry history ... All this history is complicated, but Kalayjian keeps the prose, and the book, concise and a fast and engrossing read.
Charles Glass
Rave New York Journal of Books Glass writes a simple, honest, straightforward engrossing history of the epic scale of post-traumatic stress disorder during the First World War as studied in Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh. The narrative includes many individual case studies that make the war real.
J C Hallman
Mixed The New York Journal of Books \"Truman Capote referred to works like Say Anarcha as nonfiction novels. Hallman uses that material and much more to write a broad if complicated narrative rich in detail about the times and world in which Sims lived ... Readers could sometimes find this work difficult to follow...The author uses the meteor shower of 1833, the comet of 1835, and other astronomical events as metaphors ... Anarcha is a ghost, hardly any record of her exists beyond Sims’ writings. Hallman’s research has turned up much of what else survives with the rest coming from guesswork and presumption to tell a story around the lives of the real Anarcha and Sims.\
Peter Cozzens
Rave New York Journal of Books Peter Cozzens’ storytelling works well. The author reclaims a lost but important chapter in American history with an engaging, highly readable narrative that doesn’t make the details overbearing.
Nick Tabor
Positive New York Journal of Books Much of this story is effectively and simply explained in just the introduction. Africatown, throughout, has a sense of immediacy and intimacy, the readers almost seem to learn this important saga of African American history with the author. Better copy editing would have made the text smoother, however. Although sometimes abrupt and crude, overall the prose flows and reads well, both fast and enlightening. More explanation of terms such as the \'middle passage\' or of the international efforts to end the transatlantic slave trade... would help some readers.
Edward J Larson
Positive New York Journal of Books The narrative has clear writing and solid scholarship that does not promote an agenda, leaving the reader to imagine broader implications and slavery’s legacy. Scholars can find minor points to quibble over but, overall, it comes across as an honest effort ... A solid narrative highlighted with vignettes of people such as Olaudah Equiiano and and Benjamin Bannaker. Larson does not kick ghosts but rather he seeks to understand and explain this past.
Sarah Gristwood
Rave New York Journal of Books Sarah Gristwood skips the pretense of the standard historical political study to get right to the courtly love ... [The Tudors in Love] does not just retell the familiar stories but adds the great not-so-well-known background, that requires doing so in many pages and words. For the Tudor history lover, this work will open new views in fast easy prose but thoroughly, and by necessity, with a lot of ground to cover.
Jonathan Freedland
Positive The New York Journal of Books Freedland enthusiastically makes his informal retelling of this story of a daring escape from a horror on an unimaginable scale a particular tale of high adventure.
Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman
Positive New York Journal of Books ... an almost heartbeat by heartbeat account of December 7, 1941 and the four days that followed ... Simms and Laderman never lose sight of the ways that these events affected how the Nazis treated European Jews ... The prose in Hitler’s American Gamble needs polish (and more clarity, identifiers, nouns, and pronouns). That, however, will not prevent the interested reader from finding a fast-moving, even gripping story that informs as well as enlightens.
Maureen Quilligan
Positive New York Journal of Books An epic saga ... The author keeps the narrative focused when it could have become mind numbingly complicated for readers not familiar with the subject, even as it discredits popular misconceptions about commonly accepted misinformation.
Edward Slingerland
Positive The New York Journal of Books ... written in a straight-forward and lively, entertaining personal style. Slingerland amuses and educates, not just about ethanol excess, but also the relevance for understanding guilty pleasures as a whole, in the present and in its ancient roots.
Kim Todd
Rave New York Journal of Books These stories make for high adventure ... Todd writes clearly, entertainingly, and, most of all honestly. Journalists covered in Sensational would approve ... The final chapters of Sensational include the author’s failed effort to discern the identity of Chicago’s mysterious \'Girl Reporter\' and information on the later careers of the book’s main characters. It also has annotation, illustrations, and a bibliography.
Rosalind Miles
Positive New York Journal of Books The Women’s History of the Modern World revolves around certain women heroes, ‘every one in search of an identity, a new life, and a means to throw off the chains of the past ... The text of The Women’s History of the Modern World has many such entertaining snippets of pasts unfortunately forgotten. Including gains made by women, even when temporary, would have helped to better make the author’s points, however, as would have women as something other than always victims ... Broad claims in The Women’s History of the Modern World of the unfairness of the treatment of women, however true, do not find general proof in the experience of specific individuals ... Important points on women’s history in Western Europe appear in this work in various places, with individual examples.
Gabrielle Glaser
Mixed New York Journal of Books It is a grim history of disease, immigration, labor, poverty, race, sexism, and suffering ... American Baby leaves out much. It does not explore the adopted who do not want to know their biological relatives or mothers not seeking the children they placed in adoption, or how some reunions prove disappointing or negative. No mention appears of the positive efforts made by many states to facilitate adoptees meeting their biological parents. This book ends with a plea from the author for revisions to existing laws to allow for better opportunities for adoptees to reunite with biological parents. American Baby provides a meaningful discussion on where we have been on and how we need to change the adoption system.
Robin Lane Fox
Positive New York Journal of Books Fox adds fact and understanding to the general public’s knowledge and misunderstanding of medicine in classical Greece. Many questions remain but he finds answers not just by literary examination but also archaeology .. The reader does not need medical or philosophical knowledge to follow this clear and interesting text. It makes a good introduction to the Greek world in general. The book has a detailed and informative list of illustrations and useful maps.
Charles J. Hanley
Positive The New York Journal of Books The book is a fast and engrossing haunting read that thoroughly educates while pulling on the heart strings. It blends military campaigns with real politic, while never losing sight of the people in the context of the immorality and savagery of war.
Neil Price
Positive New York Journal of Books Neil Price writes an anything but romantic history in Children of Ash and Elm. The narrative is entertaining reading, a fully documented history of the Vikings ... The maps in Children of Ash and Elm show the vast scale of this unique Empire ... a thorough, readable, one-volume history of the evolving Viking culture built on the documentary and on archaeology.
Gerard Koeppel
Positive The New York Journal of Books With patience, the reader will find an epic who dunnit in this detailed but somewhat disorganized narrative set in a very different America. Such a work can be fun, true crime at its best!
Thomas Penn
Rave The New York Journal of Books Sufficient documentation, aided by Penn’s entertaining, easy to follow narrative, makes their lives and times real ... Telling of those 24 years takes Penn 688 pages of scholarly, in-depth, but well-written text. A Royal Tragedy has annotations, bibliography, and color illustrations. It also has useful family charts and maps.
Yuval Noah Harari
Positive New York Journal of Books Educators who argue that students need more than ever to see a global all-encompassing history might applaud the publication of Sapiens or they might condemn it as too abbreviated. The prose sometimes does come across as too casual, simplistic, and even flippant. Harari writes with terse, modern, simple, short paragraphs suitable to Internet-era attention span. The author does present the important ideas punctuated with brief, relevant examples given ... Sapiens can produces thought on the things that matter and in manageable bytes to anyone. Although designed for a popular audience Sapiens is also for the new student of the broadest history imaginable. The accidental as well as the deliberate reader will have to think—and that means much in the 21st century.
Robert Harms
Positive New York Journal of Books Robert Harms tells this epic as an important chapter in the history of the world ... Harms\' description of Equatorial African slavery appears both familiar and elsewhere unfamiliar to students of the contemporary American institution ... Harms carries the reader along swiftly, as a great adventure story will, with easy prose that leaves out nothing of the character of the world described.
Iain MacGregor
Positive The New York Journal of Books MacGregor does not write a spy novel, but an engrossing read built on solid documentation and witnesses to when Berlin became the center of a Cold War on the verge of a nuclear holocaust. It would make a great gift for anyone who lived in and served in that place and time ... The book has annotation, a bibliography, and some photographs but only one map and it is only of Cold War Germany.
William C. Davis
Rave The New York Journal of Books Davis seamlessly blends the immediate events and the background to tell history not well known. He includes in this flow of information, for example, the odyssey of the Kentucky reinforcements, the problems with trans-Atlantic communications, and the importance of the artillery ... The annotation and bibliography shows the depth of Davis\' research. The author draws the campaign in detail, including the battles on land and sea, as well as the roles of the famous and forgotten.
Anthony Everitt
Mixed The New York Journal of Books Anthony Everitt\'s understanding of the world of Alexander the Great does better at solving the mystery of the man than in solving his death. The prose does well as education and entertainment although the author acts informal at times, such as some of his terminology and in the chapter headings.
Paul Strathern
Positive The New York Journal of Books The ambitions, challenges, debauchery, failures, and successes of Alexander and his children in this Renaissance soap opera became a television mini-series recently. Here, however, the reader reads history in detail but for a popular audience, with a supporting cast that includes Ferdinand and Isabella, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Lorenzo the Magnificent ... No one needs a background in the Renaissance and its Holy Roman Church to enjoy this epic and fast-paced tale of debauchery, intrigue, politics, and more. The book includes useful maps of Italy and dramatis personae of the characters.
James P. Delgado
Positive The New York Journal of Books Delgado writes as high adventure, a book in which the reader can enjoy it just flipping through the pages. He writes a clear and entertaining narrative but also makes profound observations on what war on water means ... does not have annotation, but it does include a solid bibliography. It has many illustrations and relevant maps.
Clay Risen
Positive New York Journal of Books The Crowded Hour attacks many misconceptions ... Risen does not give Roosevelt a pass on race, an interesting aspect with the modern trend of attacking ghosts of heroes past on that issue ... The Crowded Hour, with a rousing narrative, does Roosevelt justice, but it serves even better in explaining the 1898 war.