About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Philip Caputo
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... powerful ... The seven stories in Hunter’s Moon act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century ... Caputo’s wisdom runs deep. Few writers have better captured the emotional lives of men, their desperate yearning to improve them and their utter lack of tools or capacity to accomplish the task ... The publisher bills this collection as \'a novel in stories,\' but the stories don’t combine, interweave and run together to form any sort of collective denouement. It’s not a novel. And that’s O.K. Just let them be stories and let us enjoy Caputo’s masterly telling ... [Caputo] all but begs his countrymen to ask for help and open up: Take care of one another, you bighearted lunks, you stubborn fools, you American men.
Philip Dray
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"What is O.K. to hunt, when and why? The Fair Chase isn’t a book about ethics and philosophy, but Dray does a fine job introducing his readers to the issues in play ... The Fair Chase can be frustrating at times. Dray’s historical method involves a bit of overlapping and backtracking, and he sometimes seems more interested in the literary description and public presentation of hunting rather than the act itself. Hunting is an emotional, blood-racing activity, and Dray seems happy to leave the intense feelings it provokes to in-the-field writers ... Still, he isn’t afraid to lay out hard truths, including the ways in which the National Rifle Association, once a hunting group, has hijacked an important and honorable pastime for gun-selling ends.\
Louise Erdrich
Positive The New York Times Sunday Book Review In The Plague of Doves, Erdrich returns to familiar territory, the stark plains of North Dakota, where the little town of Pluto sits beside rusting railroad tracks, slowly dying. What’s killing it? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself … The tension between Indians and whites in The Plague of Doves is both historical and geographical. Pluto is next to the reservation, and some say the town fathers stole tribal land. That’s minor, though, compared with the real stain on Pluto’s reputation: ‘In 1911, five members of a family — parents, a teenage girl, and an 8- and a 4-year-old boy — were murdered,’ one of the narrators recalls … The question of who really murdered that farm family adds suspense to the plot, but deeper, more satisfying discoveries arrive with the slow unspooling of the community’s bloodlines, with their rich and complex romantic entanglements.
Sherman Alexie
Rave The New York Times Sunday Book Review The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is Alexie’s first foray into the young adult genre, and it took him only one book to master the form … The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian may be his best work yet. Working in the voice of a 14-year-old forces Alexie to strip everything down to action and emotion, so that reading becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day while waiting after school for a ride home.