About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Ed Zwick
Positive The Wall Street Journal \"Not everyone is remembered so fondly, but the author on the whole comes off as humble about his success and charmingly self-deprecating. Writing in an age of superhero franchises and declining theatrical attendance, he observes with a sigh that \'movies for grown-ups on a large scale,\' his métier, \'just aren’t being made these days.\' There are notable exceptions to that claim, of course, but his memoir still evokes an era of Hollywood that feels different from our own.\
Brad Fox
Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Fox... uses the naturalist’s experience of the depths to anchor his life story. It’s an unorthodox way to structure a book, but in Mr. Fox’s sure hands it works wonderfully ... More compelling than Grant’s odious race science are Beebe’s musings on the ocean depths, which Mr. Fox renders in lyrical and wry prose ... [Beebe\'s] His reflections from a half-mile down suffuse one of the most fascinating and unusual new books I’ve read in some time.
Yevgenia Belorusets, trans. Greg Nissan
Positive The Wall Street Journal An essential document of the Ukrainian people’s experience of the conflict ... no veil of fiction stands between the reader and the nightmare of life under military assault.
Markiyan Kamysh
Positive Wall Street Journal Mr. Kamysh gives an impressionistic account of sneaking into and guiding daring travelers around the Exclusion Zone ... Mr. Kamysh’s tone is consistently hard-boiled ... On the inherent health risk that comes with habitually entering a nuclear wasteland, Mr. Kamysh is rather blasé. The voice of the \'Chornobyl underground in literature\' approaches his calling with a smirking fatalism, and he worries more about eluding the authorities than radiation. These days, illegal tourists in the Exclusion Zone are the least of Ukrainians’ concerns.
Jason Schreier
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... in Press Reset [Schreier] draws a broader portrait of the volatile videogame industry. He follows the employees at a number of companies as they navigate the highs and lows of a rewarding yet frequently chaotic line of work ... Press Reset is full of eye-opening firsthand reports.
Helen Scales
Positive The Christian Science Monitor The Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher chronicles the unlikely friendship between a South African naturalist and an octopus ... It’s also a celebration of the ocean’s strange beauty. So too is Helen Scales’ The Brilliant Abyss ... The author lucidly explains not only the geological contours of the deep but also the animals that inhabit it ... Scales bids us to think of the deep not merely as a place to exploit for resources, but as a wondrous abode that we are compelled to protect— a precious realm that we should all care about.
Polly Samson
Positive Open Letters Review Much of the advanced praise for A Theater for Dreamers —the book was first published in the UK last year—speaks to its immersive, transporting nature, and that assessment is spot on ...Erica is an observant witness to this island drama, even as she processes her own trauma. Samson’s character sketches—she’s currently writing the introductions for the reissues of Charmian’s two memoirs—remain convincing and well-done throughout, as the jealousies and suspicions of her various personages escalate to a boil ... successfully brings to life a lost milieu in all its scenery and personality. It’s the perfect read for this time of resurgent travel.
Giovanni Catelli
Positive The Wall Street Journal In short, staccato chapters, Mr. Catelli recounts his investigation into the circumstances surrounding Camus’s car crash. He also revisits the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Camus’s connection to a pair of literary figures: the Czech writer Jan Zábrana and the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. Mr. Catelli’s case is compelling but far from ironclad, and some readers will be more convinced than others. But his book provides a clear and useful window into the currents that political writers were forced to navigate during the Cold War ... Mr. Catelli can be somewhat breathless in telling his story ... Mr. Catelli is admirable in his dogged pursuit. He strives to determine who was the source for Zábrana’s diary entry, and speculates how the Soviets could have known Camus’s itinerary that fateful day in 1960. He meets with Zábrana’s widow, Marie Zábranová, who shares candidates who might have told her husband about the Camus incident ... Ultimately, Mr. Catelli may have more to say about Camus the man and writer than Camus the murder victim.
George Saunders
Rave The Open Letters Review ... [Saunders] instills the collected fictions with a new layer of richness. That said, taking these stories a \'page at a time,\' as the author himself acknowledges, is a bit tedious. I, for one, was glad that for the rest of the way, Saunders saves his comments for afterwards ... Saunders brings his own humanist sensibility to these stories ... Saunders’s tone remains charmingly self-deprecating, as he probes these stories’ merits both in composition and philosophical content. Above all, he pours his ever-generous heart into his readings, often revealing hidden threads of humor and compassion ... would be worth owning if only to have all seven stories in a single volume. Yet beyond that, George Saunders has written a loving tribute not only to the giants of Russian literature, not just to the short story, but to fiction itself.