About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Patrick Bishop
Positive The Wall Street Journal There are many perceptive portraits here ... It is in Mr. Bishop’s dispelling of the myth, as perpetuated by De Gaulle, that Paris had liberated itself with minimal assistance from the Allies, that his book impresses most.
Wolfram Eilenberger, trans. by Shaun Whiteside
Positive The Guardian (UK) In his enjoyable book, Eilenberger manages to convey not only his characters’ complicated lives but the convoluted flow of their endlessly agitated minds ... The ceaseless intellectual questing of all four makes for fascinating reading.
Jonathan Freedland
Rave Times Literary Supplement (UK) Drawing on Vrba’s memoirs, and on conversations with his first wife and his widow, Jonathan Freedland has put together both the story of Vrba’s two years in Auschwitz and – perhaps most interestingly – the long saga of the aftermath of his escape. It is written almost as fiction and moves at a great pace ... Jonathan Freedland has produced a painstaking and very readable reconstruction of Vrba’s increasingly frantic attempts to convince a world of facts it did not want to hear. It is a valuable, if depressing, reminder, at a time when veracity is everywhere under threat, of the fragility of the truth.
Halik Kochanski
Positive The Spectator (UK) ... compendious ... She might perhaps have written more about the backlash against the resistance ... It is impossible, even in a book of this length, to cover every aspect of a subject that spans six years, an entire continent and a vastly complicated array of networks and characters. Its value lies in identifying and recording the great sweep of resistance activities, and as an overview it will prove invaluable to historians.
Judith Mackrell
Positive The Wall Street Journal Group biographies are notoriously hard to write, and there are moments in The Correspondents when Ms. Mackrell’s protagonists merge and blur. But what comes across is a powerful and convincing picture of the overwhelming struggle these women—and others like them—were forced to endure to make themselves heard ... The Correspondents is more than an overview of how women reporters fared in the first real war in which they were determined to be major players ... Ms. Mackrell...also paints here a picture of war reporting at a time when correspondents were not tied to their editors and their offices by cellphones, when there were opportunities to do considerable research, and when personal contacts—and personal charm—were often determining factors.
Carole Angier
Rave The Guardian (UK) [Angier] has done a meticulous job of research, both in Germany, where Sebald was born, and in England, where he lived for much of his adult life, interviewing hundreds of friends and colleagues, scrutinising every scrap of his voluminous writings, and unearthing the identity of many of the characters whose stories he used ... In her long and scholarly book, a testament to the powers of research and detailed dissection, Angier has presented a remarkable portrait of a writer consumed by work, a man who fashioned, out of his own considerable erudition and culture, his imagination and his empathy, a kind of writing that was entirely his own. Speak, Silence will certainly turn readers back to the four great books that made him one of the most famous German writers of modern times.
John Gooch
Positive The Guardian (UK) As John Gooch spells out again and again in his scrupulous account of Mussolini’s wars, Italy at every stage lacked resources, which made her ever more fatally beholden to Germany, her dangerous and untrustworthy ally ... Over much of Gooch’s long and fascinating book hangs Mussolini’s personality. By turn gungho and monosyllabic, truculent and cheerful, he changed his senior soldiers around, issued orders and then cancelled them, committing Italy to battles she could not win. Gooch is skilful at carrying his narrative forward, through painful campaigns and quixotic tactics, through advances and retreats, victories and losses.
Maggie Paxson
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... both a personal quest to understand her family’s connection with Trocmé and a reflection on Ms. Paxson’s own field of study. Part history and part reporting, it contains reimagined scenes and speculations, along with digressions on such topics as demography and cave painting ... peace, like happiness or love, Ms. Paxson recognizes, is not measurable but rather a \'dynamic\' force \'not located in the beginning or the end, but in the unfolding.\'
Jack Fairweather
Rave The Spectator Pilecki’s own story is tragic, and Fairweather tells it well ... What distinguishes The Volunteer is Fairweather’s meticulous attention to accuracy ... The fascination of his book lies not just in the story of Witold Pilecki and his brave friends, nor in its punctilious chronicle of the information reaching the Allies, but the light it throws on Auschwitz’s early days, before it turned into a mass-killing centre for Europe’s Jews. If it sometimes seems as though there is nothing left to uncover about the Holocaust, Fairweather’s gripping book proves otherwise.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Positive The Guardian (UK) Given the speed with which memories alter and the way that perceptions of the past shift to reflect the mood of the present, [the testimonies] might have benefited from a little more context—the ages of the witnesses perhaps, or the dates of the interviews. But this is a small matter. What counts is that Alexievich has refused to allow Soviet history to be written without the voices of the people who endured the wars, calamities, famines, poverty and political persecutions that filled the 20th century. However grim and repetitive her books are, the cumulative effect, not least of Lost Witnesses, is extremely powerful. This is for the most part because her own views—that war is atrocious, and that the poor, the powerless, minorities and dissidents, and even people who simply happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, are readily disposed of by those in power—are explicit in her choice of excerpts and the craft with which she shapes them. Few people have ever conjured better the pain of loss.
Aaron Shulman
Mixed The Wall Street Journal It is hard to find joy anywhere in The Age of Disenchantments, though Mr. Shulman’s occasional novelistic speculations lift its sense of desolation. Mr. Shulman’s decision to pursue his narrative on two levels—one as the portrait of a dysfunctional, quarrelsome family of misfits; the other as the history of modern Spain—doesn’t always work. Panero’s death, halfway through the narrative, robs the story of its central focus, all the more so since Panero is certainly the family’s most interesting and enigmatic character: a Franco supporter who published the dictator’s loudest critic, Pablo Neruda, and, while in London after the war, a friend to anti-Franco exiles. It is as a portrait of an earlier Spain, before Franco crushed its people, that the book works best: when poets were widely loved and celebrated and, as a young visitor to the Paneros’ house put it, \'all the young people were drunk with hope and poetry.\'
Neil MacGregor
Rave The Guardian This scholarly, elegantly written book is a reminder of how seldom, when visiting a museum, most of us take the time to inquire into what lies behind the objects we look at. Living with the Gods is a celebration of curiosity ... It is also hard not to feel, at the end of this fascinating book, that with our battery farms, exploitation of resources, pollution and the hunting of animals and birds to extinction, the interrelationship between humans and the living world is seriously out of kilter. We have a very long way to go before we live properly either with the gods or with each other.
Richard Beard
Positive The Guardian As much as an account of a death, this is a portrait of a family ... a touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past. It is also a sad indictment of the private school culture still prevalent in the late 70s, which believed that only by squashing emotion could true character be formed ... a memorable addition to the growing collection of memoirs on loss and grief.
Norman Eisen
Positive The Wall Street Journal It’s a deft and fascinating narrative ... The Last Palace is steeped in politics, military history, architectural lore and anecdotes. Mr. Eisen has combed state, private and military archives across Europe, the U.S. and Israel for his material. He has employed teams of research assistants, interviewed dozens of witnesses and Petschek descendants, and read numerous memoirs and war-crime trial files. The Petschek family documents in Prague, scattered in various locations, occupy several hundred boxes. The book’s detailed source notes alone, downloadable online, run to almost 200 pages and are a proof of what there is to be found, in the telling of history, for someone with time, energy, resourcefulness, contacts and money. If it seems churlish to mention that, for all the vast scholarship, the narrative is peppered with historical details the author cannot possibly have known, it is also true that Mr. Eisen’s easy, fluid style and the richness of his material make for very pleasurable historical reading.
Diane Atkinson
Positive The Guardian Though this 10-year dramatic chronicle starts with 45-year-old Fabian and social reformer Emmeline Pankhurst, and her three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, who founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in October 1903, Atkinson rightly dedicates much of her book to the many hundreds of less celebrated figures whose fight was no less dogged ... Atkinson’s survey is indeed comprehensive, but her determination to give as many women as possible their due has inevitably resulted in a book that, though full of fascinating vignettes, is more an encyclopedia than a historical narrative. What stays in the mind, however, is the sheer bloody-minded determination and courage of a large number of these campaigners, as well as the little remembered brutality of the police and the government towards them.
Susan Ronald
Mixed The Wall Street Journal The best part of Ms. Ronald’s book is her account of Florence Gould’s war ... Ms. Ronald takes the opportunity to create scenes full of intrigue, as when the exiled Italian antifascist Carlo Rosselli and his brother were assassinated in Normandy while staying at Gould’s hotel ... But this speculation, like other instances in the book, is just that: speculative ... One of the problems with writing about compulsive liars and mythomanes is how to find out and be sure of the truth. Though Ms. Ronald is forced to fall back repeatedly on conjecture, she paints a lively picture of the world in which Florence moved, with all its intricate financial shenanigans, rivalrous investors and glittering social occasions. But there are small errors ... But if the author breezes over certain details, her narrative certainly moves at a brisk pace, even if her main characters besides Florence often remain shadowy.
Paul Kix
Positive The Wall Street Journal ...an odd, ill-judged episode that took place when he was in his late 70s that he [Robert de La Rochefoucauld] is best remembered in France, and this forms both the prelude and the epilogue to Paul Kix’s biography, The Saboteur ... Mr. Kix has consulted numerous diaries, interviewed survivors and spent much time with La Rochefoucauld’s family and friends ...research is meticulous, though small errors have crept in...as Mr. Kix describes it, is a work of 'narrative nonfiction,' and it is written in a novelistic style, with much reported speech and many references to smells, sights, thoughts and feelings not actually possible to corroborate ...book does little to explain the decades of willful amnesia that settled over swathes of French society. But it provides a lively picture of a brave man, for whom patriotism, nobility and duty were immutable principles of life.
Mark Mazower
Rave The Guardian At every stage, Mazower sets off in pursuit of aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends and fellow revolutionaries, who moved from country to country, changing names and identities, escaping camps and prisons, prying them out from the stones under which they have hidden, clasping at the ‘threads in the tangled skein of this vanished micro society of the Russian Jewish emigration that I was trying to unravel’. He follows scraps of information, names found in letters or telephone directories, documents long buried deep in archives. The cast of characters grows and grows … What You Did Not Tell is proof of what historical research can yield, providing you have the determination, skill and boundless curiosity to pursue it to the bitter end. But it is also an affectionate portrait of a family whose members Mazower got to know, love and respect more and more as he discovered things that reticence, modesty and an instinctive need for silence had kept resolutely hidden.
Meredith Hindley
Positive The Wall Street Journal Casablanca was indeed a hotbed of intrigue. But it would be a mistake to confuse Ms. Hindley’s book with the film. What she has produced is a detailed account of the war years in Morocco, the country’s feuds between pro- and anti-Vichy officials, its diplomatic deals and stand-offs, and the setbacks and successes of the Allied landings. This is a book for historians, not film buffs ... Ms. Hindley is good at evoking these adventurers, schemers and idealists ... Digging deep into military archives in Britain, France and the U.S., Ms. Hindley has produced a scholarly narrative, weaving her way deftly among a large cast of characters, both familiar and unfamiliar.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
Rave The Guardian Her years of meticulous listening, her unobtrusiveness and her ear for the telling detail and the memorable story have made her an exceptional witness to modern times. Critics have objected to the lack of all but brief interlinking passages, but if anything the few that are there intrude: the effect of this seamless flow of voices is one of immediacy. Like Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, Alexievich’s book is a map not of events but of the character and emotions of those involved in them. This is oral history at its finest and it is also an essay on the power of memory, on what is remembered and what is forgotten. 'It’s terrible to remember,' one woman told her. 'But it’s far more terrible to forget.'”
Lesley M. M. Blume
Positive The Wall Street Journal ...meticulously document[ed] ... For Everybody Behaves Badly, Ms. Blume has drawn deeply upon many sources, particularly Hemingway’s own correspondence, to deftly portray the cast of lost characters, their thin-skinned vanities and their quarrelsome insecurities.
Ben Rawlence
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...a deeply disturbing and depressing portrait of the violence, destitution, fear, sense of hopelessness and neglect in which a large number of the world’s estimated 60 million forcibly displaced people now live ... beautifully and movingly painted.