About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Chris Nashawaty
Positive The New Yorker For anyone who delights in the perpetration of human error, be it of judgment, taste, or commercial savvy, Nashawaty offers a wealth of historical evidence ... Such is Nashawaty’s command of superlatives that he merits a sci-fi yarn of his own ... To Nashawaty’s credit, his book is more privately provocative, obliging its readers to be honest with themselves.
Andrew Stauffer
Positive The New Yorker A compact biography, elegantly structured around a few choice pickings from the poet’s correspondence.
John Berryman, ed. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae
Positive The New Yorker You have to reach back to Donne to find so commanding an exercise in the clever-sensual ... gossip hunters will slouch off in frustration, and good luck to them; on the other hand, anyone who delights in listening to Berryman, and who can’t help wondering how the singer becomes the songs, will find much to treasure here, in these garrulous and pedantic pages. There is hardly a paragraph in which Berryman—poet, pedagogue, boozehound, and symphonic self-destroyer—may not be heard straining toward the condition of music. \'I have to make my pleasure out of sound,\' he says. The book is full of noises, heartsick with hilarity, and they await their transmutation into verse.
Bill Clinton & James Patterson
Mixed The New Yorker \"...the entire novel has an air of narrative lockdown, with Duncan seldom interacting with anyone beyond his immediate circle or his international peers, even after he has flown the official coop. His pronouncements, on the page, evince an ardent faith in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but you badly want him to hang out with the people ... Whatever the ratio of their labors, one thing is certain: everything you expect from Patterson is here, unadulterated, right down to the ritual mixing of the metaphors ... In short, not even an ex-President, for all his heft and influence, can mar the charms of so transcendent a technique, or curb its ability to suck us in...It goes without saying that The President Is Missing is written in the present tense, or, to be accurate, in a specialist subset of that tense. Think of it as the hysteric present ... Let’s be fair, though. Somehow, The President Is Missing rises above its blithely forgivable faults. It’s a go-to read. It maximizes its potency and fulfills its mission. There’s a twist or two of which Frederick Forsyth might be proud. So, if you want to make the most of your late-capitalist leisure-time, hit the couch, crack a Bud, punch the book open, focus your squint, and enjoy.\
Arthur Lubow
Positive The New Yorker Lubow is entering a crowded arena, for the Arbus industry is hardly a place of repose. Yet the author fights for his spot, and earns it. His research is unflagging and his timing is good, for Arbus could scarcely be more fashionable, with her thrill at the fluidity of genders, and her trafficking with anonymity and fame ... Lubow is more intent upon the shifts in Arbus’s work. He is rightly amused, too, by the clash of her professional ardor with her domestic duties ... Readers of Lubow’s biography may feel not just the heft of the thing, over seven hundred pages and twice as long as Bosworth’s, but a nagging suspicion that it dreams of being a novel.