About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
John Ganz
Rave Air Mail \"Ganz, a history-minded essayist and successful newsletter pamphleteer, systematically dismantles the comforting notion that the current civic emergency is some unprecedented break with history ... Ganz lets the happenings of history speak on their own terms, re-invested with the energy and ridiculousness of current events, trusting the reader to hear the alarming echoes and harmonies ... Ganz’s 1990s sound like today because they sound like America. This creates the space for more intriguing thoughts to develop; a chapter on Rush Limbaugh and the masculine mass-media aggression of shock-talk radio, amplified by corporate consolidation, turns to the matter of large-scale male loneliness.\
Adelle Waldman
Rave Air Mail Waldman observes her characters with the hilarious, remorseless precision real people use on real people ... Waldman’s briskly roving point of view captures the constant squeeze on everyone.
Martin Baron
Mixed Air Mail It’s a promising setup, but Baron offers very few juicy or even semi-juicy tidbits about his experience with Bezos ... It’s a grim story about Trump’s imperviousness to journalistic truth.
Katie Spalding
Positive Air Mail There’s something hopeful about a book setting out to tell us that our fabled geniuses were weirdos and goofballs. It supposes that greatness is still real enough to need demystifying. Spalding teases her subjects because, most of the time, she wants to express what was admirable about them ... All that variety makes the book hang together awkwardly in places. Like many of its distractible subjects, Edison’s Ghosts can’t quite focus on one task systematically: some chapters are biographical sketches of an entire chaotic life; others narrate a single quirk or incident ... Spalding is at her best not as a witticist but as an enthusiast, when the book moves from poking the reader in the ribs to eagerly pointing out this or that engaging idea.
Stephan Talty
Positive Air Mail Talty, trying to grasp Howell’s nature from cradle to grave, lingers more on the details ... Through its close attention to Koresh’s life, Talty’s account ends up being in some respects the less sympathetic one.
Bret Easton Ellis
Mixed Air Mail Ham-fisted foreshadowing is central to the Bret Ellis style; the horror in question is constantly being previewed and post-viewed through the novel’s nearly 600 pages ... Behind all the familiar sights is something Bret desperately wants the reader not to notice. The book builds toward a shattering secret that is not especially hard to see coming—the other characters keep more or less saying it, point-blank, and so do Bret’s choices of music and video entertainment—but the revelation just replaces one set of inconsistencies and improbabilities with another. The book ends up on the same question it begins with: Why is Bret telling us this? ... Bret Easton Ellis would rather lock his teenage alter ego inside a horror novel than let him face something that might resemble real life.
Max Fisher
Positive Air Mail Usually, personally, I’m more fascinated by the badness of the machines—by the evidence that systems like Facebook and YouTube have attained a size and complexity where, even without literal machine consciousness, they now bend human activity to serve their endless growth and other demands. Fisher has brought together years of reporting, from corporate messaging to whistleblower leaks, to document the inexorable perversity of the algorithms ... it’s also true that neither the Khmer Rouge nor the Turks needed Facebook to carry out genocide, and that actual lynch mobs long pre-dated Twitter mobs. Unraveling these causes and effects, inside and outside the algorithmic black boxes, is going to require years of work, with a range of intellectual tools beyond those of the computer programmer or the newspaper reporter ... Still, Fisher has drawn together a chilling record of the events and the cultural and commercial imperatives behind them, and how the perversity of machines and of people, working in tandem, have upended life around the globe.
David Hanna
Rave Airmail The echoes of current life in Hanna’s account are unavoidable—\'Coverage of giant rallies, and an endless barrage of chauvinism, half-truths, and outright lies poured forth from cheap new mass-produced radios,\' he writes of Germany under the newly ascendant Hitler—but where our 21st century hangs helplessly between crisis and stasis, here the 1930s are self-consciously dynamic...Broken Icarus is less interested in narrating the story of how the grim events of the decade would unfold than it is in simply winding back the stories we already know, to reach the moment when our historical certainties were only possibilities among other possibilities...The best vantage point to see these converging and diverging contingencies, in Hanna’s reckoning, is the edge of Lake Michigan, at the 1933 World’s Fair—an event caught in its own ambivalent place in history, \'planned in one era of plenty and carried out in another of austerity\'...We went to the moon and then we stopped going there, stalled out in the jet age...\'Over eighty years on,\' Hanna writes, \'we’re now further away from the future envisioned on the shores of Lake Michigan than we were fifty years ago.\'
Cathy O'Neil
Pan Air Mail ... it’s not always so easy to follow her account of how the shame machines work, what they are, or what to do about them ... O’Neil tries to clarify the differences between good and bad shame, or good and bad shamelessness, by repeatedly (unto repetitively) classifying efforts to shame someone as \'punching up\' or \'punching down.\' The former is a good and just re-alignment of power; the latter is abuse. Yet amid shifting contexts and value systems—to say nothing of widespread moral opportunism—\'up\' and \'down\' are dangerously undefined ... The book would like to be optimistic ... Homeless people could be given public housing, she argues, and people with drug addictions could be treated, with their habits decriminalized. But self-righteousness is a useful weapon; even now, Republicans are denouncing safe-injection centers as a scheme to hand out government-funded crack pipes.
Brad Ricca
Mixed Air Mail True Raiders belongs to the genre of book where any shortcomings in the documentary record are smoothed over with abundant made-up stuff ... A camera’s-eye narrative traces details no camera would have seen, and conversations among long-dead people have stage directions written in ... For those of us with strict and intolerant standards for nonfiction, this obviously unverifiable stuff tends to unsuspend disbelief, sending one hurrying to the endnotes to try to get a feel for how far beyond the source texts things have strayed ... But facts truly are stubborn things, and their stubbornness has a peculiar effect here. Despite the showmanship, there is something deeply non-cinematic about True Raiders. It hops among places, times, and points of view not so much to guide a scripted plot through its storyboard as to chase the available material where it happens to go—regardless of how near to, or far from, the Ark it may be ... The story is most absorbing when the source material pulls it in the other direction—when it turns away from the magic-lantern show of well-known history, slips past the shifty and ignorant British treasure chasers and their exploited workers, and descends into the caves and tunnels with Father Louis-Hugues Vincent, a real archaeologist and Dominican priest in Jerusalem.
Anna Della Subin
Positive Air Mail Subin writes about these concepts and events essayistically, flowing from historical narratives and case studies to flashes of epigrammatic insight. What seems like a symbolic resonance often enough turns out to be literal...and what sound like distant spiritual curiosities turn out to be disconcertingly close ... Thus we get the case of Prince Philip, the late consort of Queen Elizabeth II, known in the popular press as a sort of boorish caricature of useless aristocracy but worshipped in certain villages in the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanuatu as \'the son of the volcano god Kalbaben.\' Abroad, this was taken as a comical footnote to Philip’s career, but Subin—without sacrificing the inherent humor—grounds it in the history of a colonized land ravaged by \'the chaos and dysfunction of the Anglo-French Condominium, or Pandemonium, as it was known,\' and suffering from the suppression of its folk traditions by missionaries.
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein
Pan Air Mail Noise, the book argues (as it must), is everywhere. This is meant to be startling, which is presumably why the authors avoid the standard language, so as not to simply be announcing that one of the two fundamental problems in measurement is everywhere. But the result is that their concept itself is scattered all around the outer rings of the target ... the book reads as a sort of natural history of a slightly alien world, where the boundaries between the surprising and the commonplace keep being mislocated ... Reading it all, one starts to fear that the world’s supply of counter-intuitive discoveries may be running thin—or that the surprising-ideas industry has settled into its own tropes and clichés ... What if the problem isn’t where the shots land on the target, but where the target is in the first place? It is true, as the authors lay out at length, that the American criminal-justice process sentences people to prison in arbitrary and inconsistent ways. But if everyone’s prison terms were reliably ranked according to their crimes, so that no one had a hungry judge throw the book at them, the country would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world ... Maybe the truly counter-intuitive project would be trying to make a better world, rather than optimizing the world we have.