About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Yascha Mounk
Pan The Guardian (UK) Mounk’s intellectual methodology: accusation slides effortlessly into fact; events are yoked together on the atmospherics, described in shorthand, as if the phrases \'safe space\' and \'white privilege\' are all you need to know to understand what went on ... Like going round the Hermitage. If you stopped for one minute in front of every contestable statement, you’d be there for 11 years. But I think it would feel like longer.
Bill Hayes
Rave The Guardian (UK) There is a playfulness in Hayes’s writing, which reaches from a rich topsoil of endearing wordplay to the deepest layers of curiosity and empathy. He takes a profound, historian’s pleasure in tropes that echo across centuries ... Hayes is wrong about some things – he thinks Mercuriale looks like Shakespeare, which he doesn’t at all - and absolutely fascinating in his own, idiosyncratic fascinations. In between, he splices in his personal sporting journey, from swimming to boxing to running, to being a gym rat, to glancing medit – certainly the route isn’t chronological –ations on his father, and somehow he arrives at today’s conception of exercise ... while Hayes is extremely alert to race and gender politics, never gulled by the exclusions of historical record, he’s not so hot on these big ideological fissures. If that sounds like a criticism, it isn’t; rather, a way of saying, I would have liked more views, more observations, on more subjects – basically, I would have liked this book to go on for a lot longer. Erudite, ludic, eccentric, energetic and historically transporting, it’s like falling through a gym and landing in a joust.
Kate Lister
Positive The Guardian (UK) This book contains, as the title promises, many delightful curiosities ... Lister’s vivid and playful language observes no rules of academic turgidity – sorry, thoroughness, But you can hear the lecturer in her nonetheless: she drops facts in a dainty way, as if they are trivia, yet each triggers a deeper rumination on how sex interlaces with all other human fortunes ... Dildos, the clitoris, depilatory creams are all explored in her rambunctious style. A fascinating chapter, \'Colonising the Cunt\', uncovers layer on layer of oppression almost too horrific to see collected in one place ... Moral relativism often exculpates those living in the early 19th century; the idea that, high on their own adventures, blissfully naive, they simply didn’t recognise the common humanity in any but a small number of similar-looking foreigners. This, the book delicately shows rather than tells, is bullshit ... Although there are plenty of men in this book – and not just oppressors but young lads who become \'withered and aged because of … constant masturbating\' – it is unavoidably an account of injustice against women, and a compelling one.
Jeanette Winterson
Positive The Guardian Jeanette Winterson\'s memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it\'s almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand ... There is much here that\'s impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one\'s sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start – her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father – emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged. In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her.
Jaron Lanier
Rave The Guardian Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier’s new book start off pretty familiar—at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound ... His most dispiriting observations are those about what social media does to politics—biased, \'not towards the left or right, but downwards.\' If triggering emotions is the highest prize, and negative emotions are easier to trigger, how could social media not make you sad? ... I finished this stark but exuberant account not fearing for the future so much as amazed the world wasn’t already even worse.