About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sarah Stodola
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books ... a tale that is at once informative, salacious, and foreboding ... It’ll give you the perspective to better appreciate where you are even as it makes you feel guilty for being there.
Rachel Holmes
Mixed The Washington Independent Review of Books Holmes’ lengthy accounts of the Pankhurst homes; the servants (often relatives in disguise); the food they ate; the new-age business Emmeline ran into the ground; the endless family feuds; and the later aspects of Sylvia’s public life feel positively Carovian. Unable to separate the person from the period, the author has written less a biography of one woman than a comprehensive account of the time in which that woman lived ... Holmes does offer fascinating specifics about Victorian lifestyle habits and the patriarchal system that, by turns, indulged and thwarted women’s progress. She also ably relates the Pankhursts’ downward slide into the working class (whose cause they’d long championed) and the death of two of Sylvia’s brothers in an age before the widespread use of antibiotics ... But Sylvia presents a biographer’s dilemma: Here is a trailblazer whose voluminous writings and bold actions should assure her place in history, but she has faded into obscurity. Yet to revive her prominence and put her achievements in proper context, the author must capture the era in which her subject lived. In portraying that era in the same exhaustive detail as she does her subject, however, Holmes has created an unfocused doorstop of a book that may intimidate casual readers ... It’s a shame because Pankhurst is a worthy subject — a bold, counterculture Brit who advocated for real social change. A slimmer, more targeted volume might have better achieved the author’s presumed goal: to make Sylvia Pankhurst once again widely known.
Mark Salter
Pan The Washington Independent Review of Books ... it highlights a pervasive narrative in American politics that true leaders are called to serve rather than possessing an ambition to do so. Reading Mark Salter’s The Luckiest Man, it’s clear that the late John McCain held closely to that narrative, and that Salter, his employee for nearly three decades, co-author of seven books, acolyte, and friend, seeks to preserve the image ... Based on this book, it is hard to say if McCain was lucky or plucky. Was he a maverick, as he was often called, or a traditionalist who valued antediluvian notions of honor? He brushed aside the gracelessness of abandoning his wheelchair-bound first wife to marry beer heiress Cindy Hensley and pursue a political career in Arizona, a state he had never lived in before. And the book glosses over how McCain countered the carpetbagging charge when he first ran for Congress from the Grand Canyon state ... Mark Salter’s effort to humanize the often blunt, hot-tempered, and—by contemporary definition—entitled American prince is confounding. The author might have benefited from a few more years of contemplation before attempting to capture the essential appeal of someone who nobly refused to crumble under horrific torture and called his first presidential campaign \'the Straight Talk Express,\' yet gave us Sarah Palin.
Thomas A. Schwartz
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books Kissinger’s contribution to the making of American power in the face of severe challenges from the Vietnam War to the oil crisis constitute the large work of diplomacy, statecraft, and national interest, but Schwartz places Kissinger in the middle of the petty realism of domestic and bureaucratic politics ... Kissinger—as do other leaders—likes to claim his decisions serve national interests first, but it’s worth examining that premise, and Schwartz helps by writing at length about Kissinger’s efforts to preserve his relationship with his boss, Richard Nixon.
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books Thompson argues that the Western betrayal was ultimately rooted in race. Rather than seeing Arabs as free humans, Europeans (and likely many Americans) perceived them as inferior ... The author, however, shows how the leaders of the Syrian Arab Congress were sophisticated and visionary ... That the interests of great powers override the voices of small nations is an unremarkable observation in diplomatic history, yet reading Thompson’s account of the circumstances in one particular context, and knowing the consequences that followed, is enough to make you feel outraged once again.
Suketu Mehta
Mixed The Washington Independent Review of Books ... more than just the usual homage to the narrative of America as a land of immigrants ... Mehta is an adept reporter...he stokes righteous anger with images of mistreatment of immigrants ... the power of such images and the strength of the argument for reparations are also the book’s undoing. Despite Mehta’s qualifier that he is calling for open hearts and not open borders, he is unlikely to change minds with this one. Those who pick it up are likely already convinced of his case. Those who disagree with him are unlikely to open the book.
Charles Lane
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books \"... despite its narrative pull, the book leaves behind the sinking feeling that this country’s racial strife will never end ... By declaring Hiram Whitley’s fight against the Klan America’s first \'war on terror,\' Lane is calling attention to the endurance of both legacies. That knowledge makes the fine narrative in Freedom’s Detective as sobering as it is compelling.\
Trent Dalton
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books ...[a] violent and sometimes magical coming-of-age tale ... This is Dalton’s debut novel, and he is a compelling storyteller with an exceptional voice ... [Dalton] ...writes of police corruption, but his thin description of the Vietnamese characters, as well as criminals such as Tytus and his henchmen, hurts the book’s narrative fidelity. There is a vignette of a Maori family so fleeting that the reader is left wondering where other minority groups stand in Australia ... But the group most conspicuously missing from this book in which heroin plays a central role? Addicts. Despite their involvement in the drug trade, none of the main characters use, an improbability if you know anything about the scourge of drugs ... Boy Swallows Universe would have been better with a tighter edit ... Perhaps most importantly, the book might have ended around page 353, ...which would’ve spared readers from its formulaic, Hollywood ending. Still, look out for Trent Dalton. If he finds an assertive editor for his next work, his voice will compel you to read it to the very end.
Adam Higginbotham
Positive Washington Independent Review of Books \"From the greenfield choice of the land between the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers, to the protective dome hurriedly built over the smoldering ruins of reactor four, Higginbotham re-creates the tragedy in intimate detail. Not only does he capture the wrenching events of April 25-26, 1986, when a safety-training session went awry, he also emplaces the tragedy in the long string of bureaucratic failures that preceded and succeeded it ... At its broadest, Higginbotham’s story is an exposé of the failures of the USSR and invites speculation about how the disaster might have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet empire itself. Against the backdrop of official dysfunction and neglect, Higginbotham finds the heroism of individual scientists, engineers, technicians, and soldiers who either came to build and manage the Chernobyl project with so much hope, or else arrived to contain the disaster at great risk to themselves personally.\
Rick Wilson
Mixed Washington Independent Review of Books This deliciously acerbic take-down of the 45th president feels oddly late to the party ... The story is missing the hope of resurrection, and its ranty-comedic approach betrays helplessness rather than truth-telling. But who can put it down? ... what makes the book unputdownable is who is telling it ... Wilson’s personal journey from Republican attack dog to country-over-party moralist is compelling ... Somehow, still, after a massive rant of a book, Wilson, the hard-nosed political operative, finds it acceptable that the party he helped create saw Donald Trump as a better candidate for president than Hillary Clinton ... As a \'mea freaking culpa\' then, the book falls woefully short. As an analysis of the rise of Trump and Trumpism, it covers old ground. As an inside look into the Republican party, it is shallow.
Dan Kaufman
Positive The Washington Independent Review of Books Almost every example of Wisconsin’s current fall in the book becomes more remarkable as Kaufman time travels, sometimes across many pages of text, to the state’s glorious history of progressive politics ... Kaufman is lyrical in his description of the resistance to the conservative conquest ... While Kaufman is critical of conservative policies, Governor Walker’s supporters, who are mostly missing from the book, appreciate his union-busting. Walker can also claim to have attracted Foxconn, the Chinese company that makes iPhones, to Wisconsin with large tax breaks, and he has been working hard to allow more mining in the state. Kaufman decries both efforts, but many Wisconsinites—and other Americans—see environmental damage or labor-rights retrenchment as acceptable costs for reversing decades of economic decline. Their choices cannot be politically rejected even if they are intellectually indefensible. The book is unclear about whether Scott Walker, Wisconsin, and the country have reached their apogee of conservative power, but it does serve as a marker for those who don’t want to see its permanence.