About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Stephen King
Positive Booklist King devotees will, of course, devour this latest suspenseful page-turner, but any reader looking for a smart thriller about an unusual black ops organization will find this compelling and rewarding. With his usual blend of plot twists and vividly drawn characters, King remains at the top of his game.
John Clayton
Positive Booklist ... crisply written ... Clayton paints vivid portraits of each, with Muir as the bedraggled backwoods explorer whose storytelling could charm the rich and powerful into supporting his causes, while practically minded New Yorker Pinchot peddled science and profitability to win political backing for his schemes. What makes their stories especially compelling is their preservation versus conservation debate, which still rages as environmentalists struggle to protect America’s natural resources from predatory special interests.
Jeff Guinn
Positive Booklist ... [an] offbeat, anecdote-filled mix of biography and travelogue ... As Guinn follows the cross-country perambulations of these Vagabonds—as they dubbed themselves—over ten years and from Florida to California, he also tracks the remarkable technological and cultural changes they left in their wake. A fascinating slice of rarely considered American history.
Kira Jane Buxton
Positive Booklist While S.T.’s floridly descriptive, expletive-laden narration sometimes feels self-indulgent, Buxton’s quirky ideas and compelling nonhuman characters will satisfy literary fiction and zombie genre enthusiasts alike who are looking for something beguilingly different
John Zada
Positive Booklist Zada strikes an engaging balance between curiosity and skepticism, letting the locals’ convincing stories speak for themselves while probing the science behind misperceptions and cultural beliefs. While fringe-watchers will relish Zada’s Sasquatch research, nature buffs will also enjoy his lush descriptions of the Canadian Pacific Northwest wilderness.
John Taliaferro
Rave Booklist Taliaferro...proves equal to the challenge of singing Grinnell’s long overdue praises in this sweeping account of his life and many lasting accomplishments ... Taliaferro’s work has all the earmarks of a first-rate biography: colorful anecdotes, cameos of the many famous people Grinnell rubbed elbows with, and absorbing prose that will inspire reader admiration for this often overlooked but important environmental hero.
Mark Arax
Positive Booklist Arax’s narrative flows best when describing colorful figures ... Arax’s highly readable guide to understanding an essential slice of California history also tracks the sometimes-precarious fate of the fruits and vegetables that feed our nation.
Neal Stephenson
Rave Booklist ...speculative-fiction virtuoso Stephenson creates new challenges for his returning protagonist ... Stephenson devotees with a taste for Tolkienesque fantasy will revel in the author’s imaginative world building as the story shifts ... Still, there are enough futuristic, envelope-pushing ideas here, especially related to AI and digital consciousness, to keep even nonfans and science buffs intrigued.
Brian Switek
Rave Booklist ...a rich exploration of everything our bare bones can teach us about life ... a smorgasbord of interesting details ... nformative, contemplative, and even lyrical, Switek’s work is popular-science writing at its best.
K. Chess
Positive Booklist Chess’ debut novel offers an intriguing and fresh spin on the parallel-worlds theme with its timely emphasis on the challenges facing migrants in hostile, unfamiliar surroundings, marking her as a promising new voice in speculative fiction.
Will Hunt
Positive Booklist The nonfiction debut of avowed underworld enthusiast Hunt explores the mythology and mixed emotions provoked by these mysterious, hidden recesses while providing a fascinating if sometimes unsettling travelogue of his many dimly lit explorations ... Hunt’s rich descriptions of dark and forbidden subterranean landscapes will raise goose bumps while offering a unique history of a culturally and scientifically important netherworld most people barely know exists.
Roger McNamee
Positive Booklist McNamee’s work is both a first-rate history of social media and a cautionary manifesto protesting their often overlooked and still growing dangers to human society.
Hamish McKenzie
Positive Booklist Although profiles of the inventor have already been published, this one comes from a former Tesla Motors writer who aims the spotlight less on Musk himself and more on his innovative, long-term strategy for supplanting gasoline-powered transportation ... In a dozen chapters with creative titles such as \'Go Ahead, Start a Car Company\' and \'Electric Avenue,\' McKenzie follows Musk’s path from convincing investors that electric-only vehicles could sell to designing a groundbreaking factory. A must-read for everyone interested in cars, entrepreneurship, alternative energy, and deeper insights into out-of-the-box thinking, working, and living.
James Donovan
Rave Booklist Donovan combines his masterful research skills and narrative gifts in recounting the full story of the most famous Apollo trip ... In the often gripping chapters on Apollo 11, Donovan reveals many colorful details about behind-the-scenes pressures ... Drawing on dozens of interviews with the era’s engineers and scientists, Donovan’s history is a powerfully written and irresistible celebration of the Apollo missions.
Brian McCullough
Positive Booklist Expanding on his Internet History Podcast, tech start-up expert McCullough provides readers with many good reasons to look back in amazement on the evolution of the web ... McCullough provides an entertaining and informative technological history which computer geeks and readers interested in everything from sociology to business and media will relish.
Deni Ellis Bechard
Rave Booklist ...unsettling ... Bechard’s richly nuanced prose and vividly drawn characters make captivating reading while offering provocative food for thought about humanitarianism, corruption, and racial tensions in Africa.
Sandeep Jauhar
Positive Booklist \"A string of colorfully graphic anecdotes involving skewered and bleeding patients demonstrates how much daring physicians learned about the heart by confronting trauma with ingenuity, from German surgeon Ludwig Rehn, who verified the feasibility of cardiac repair in 1897, to William Greatbatch, an inventor who created the perfect lithium battery to power pacemakers and save millions of lives. Jauhar pairs medical history with revelations of his own family’s tragic encounters with heart disease, delivering a deftly written and heartfelt (literally) contemplation of our most precious and often-misunderstood internal organ.\
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Positive Booklist In a departure from his more spectacle-driven science books, popular astrophysicist Tyson takes a sobering look here at his profession’s long-standing ties with the military ... Although Tyson devotees might find this information-packed tome a little heavy-handed, it offers a timely message about the corrupting influence of mercenary interests on science and suggests that research dollars could be better spent on helping instead of hurting.
Lisa Margonelli
Rave Booklist Online Margonelli uses her \'obsessive\' termite tale to open wider discussions about everything from the evolution of superorganisms to the morality of military drones. Her work represents science writing at its most enjoyable and informative best.
Eli Saslow
Positive Booklist \"Saslow’s decision to recount Black’s transformation with politically neutral detachment makes his story no less captivating ... Amid the current swirling controversies around racial issues, Saslow’s work is both timely and encouraging.\
Vince Beiser
Rave Booklist ...[a] fascinating if sometimes unsettling volume ... Beiser also tracks the complicated process of sand mining and exposes its little seen dark side ... A vital addition to every library collection’s coverage of resource exploitation and environmental issues.
Mark Haskell Smith
Positive Booklist Online Smith’s growing collection of novels, most bearing one word titles, have been widely praised for their unpredictable, pop-culture-driven story lines and barbed black humor. True to form, his latest farcical escapade pokes fun at Wall Street in a tale about a financial whiz. Although his gig at a foreign exchange desk puts big bucks in both his clients’ pockets and his own, Bryan LeBlanc finds rubbing elbows with greedy bankers distasteful enough to bilk them of a cool $17-million, enough embezzled money to set himself free from the rat race and sail off on a private yacht to the Caribbean ... Smith turns in another compulsively readable blend of satire, crime fiction motifs, and the occasional quirky, violent interlude in a tale that will satisfy his current fans and attract new ones.
Chris Feliciano Arnold
Positive Booklist Arnold pulls few punches in this sobering account of the unfolding genocidal threat, adding another dark layer to the urgent story environmentalists are already telling about how the logging of rain forests is playing a drastically destructive role in climate change.
Al Roker
Positive Booklist Celebrated NBC weatherman and author Roker follows his highly praised The Storm of the Century (2015) with an equally riveting account of the Johnstown Flood ... Roker turns in another informative, solidly written weather-related page-turner sure to please his fans.
Alan Stern and David Grinspoon
Positive Booklist Stern and Grinspoon’s account will appeal to space buffs and every fan of high-quality science writing.
Christopher Buckley
Positive Booklist Buckley serves up generous helpings of witty dialogue, colorful characters, and intriguing plot twists that his fans and historical novel enthusiasts will find irresistible.
Simon Winchester
Rave Booklist While Winchester underscores the importance these men’s contributions have ultimately made to today’s world of endlessly reproducible goods, he also contemplates whether in all this sameness and precision there isn’t still room for less accurate but no less valuable craftsmanship. Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.
Menno Schilthuizen
Rave Booklist Replete with fascinating facts and written in delightfully lively prose, Schilthuizen’s work will appeal to nature lovers and popular-science fans.
Jeremy Bailenson
Rave Booklist While Bailenson focuses more on laboratory studies than futuristic speculation, everyone with an interest in the digital realm, including technology entrepreneurs and gaming enthusiasts, will find his work thrillingly prophetic.
Joshua B. Freeman
Positive Booklist As Queens College history professor Freeman observes in this absorbing, multi-layered history of these large manufacturing facilities, the vast majority of goods in our homes and workplaces, from microwave ovens to blue jeans, were made in factories ... While Freeman underscores the invaluable benefits factories have contributed to civilization, his sobering dissection of their negative environmental impact shows how much room there is for improvement.
Nickolas Butler
Rave Booklist Butler achieves a rare triple play here of brilliant characterizations, a riveting story line, and superlatively measured prose, putting him in the front ranks of contemporary American writers of literary fiction.