About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sheryl Sandberg and Adam M. Grant
Rave The New York Times Book Review It is a remarkable achievement: generous, honest, almost unbearably poignant. It reveals an aspect of Sandberg’s character that Lean In had suggested but — because of the elitism at its center — did not fully demonstrate: her impulse to be helpful. She has little to gain by sharing, in excruciating detail, the events of her life over the past two years. This is a book that will be quietly passed from hand to hand, and it will surely offer great comfort to its intended readers.
Therese Oneill
Rave The Washington Post It’s hard to imagine a woman — or a teenage girl — who won’t love this book ... That these stories take place in the past allows the modern young woman to read them — and to dream about their heroines — without conflict. Perhaps it is this stubborn, enduring and thoroughly non-liberated attraction to marriage, family and home that is the true 'unmentionable.'”
Tom Wolfe
Mixed The New York Times Book Review We are dealing with a short book by a big writer on a dull topic, further complicated — as it turns out — by an old man’s willingness to digress, and the result is a qualified success ... Wolfe’s attack on Chomsky is precise, scathing and not undeserved. But what, Lord, does this have to do with the topic of language?
Mary Roach
Pan The Washington Post It’s hard to trust a reporter who 'adores' military PR men and who writes a 'grasping fan letter' to a source. Yet her descriptions of trauma injuries, and of the military’s evolving response to battlefield danger and wounds, are compelling and clear-eyed. Midway through this odd book, with its crushes and cork sandals, its gaping horrors and bloodless military euphemisms, you begin to wonder: Is this what 15 years of war have done to us? Are we willing to look at our strange, ruined and ongoing enterprise only if we have a chipper tour guide and enough depth charges of gore to keep us entertained?
Jon Krakauer
Mixed The Washington Post Missoula comes to us partly as an act of expiation, a book with a mission: to inform readers of certain brutal facts about rape and the way it can alter its victims’ lives, and to highlight the difficulty victims often experience in their search for justice. But basing it on the reported sex crimes at the University of Montana — which yet again reveal themselves to be no special example of institutional indifference — may have undermined the enterprise. There is certainly great suffering described in these pages, but the book will do more to reinforce its readers’ various opinions about college sexual assault than to bring huge numbers of them to a new understanding of its basic realities.