About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Margo Steines
Positive The New York Times Book Review A difficult book, one that makes the author’s very survival seem like a matter of luck ... Steines manages to keep her reader close, writing with a rare crystalline precision as she explores her fixation with violence and with certain forms of traditional masculinity ... What elevates Steines’s book above the difficult, often extreme experiences she shares is her willingness to look honestly and objectively at her desires ... Her narrative slackens in the present day, which is set in the heat of Tucson, where she is spending the quarantine mostly inside, pregnant and cooking healthy food with her nice new partner, a fitness trainer. In describing the ordinary miracles of falling in love, of making a baby, she loses the fiercely searching quality of her earlier history.
Jean M. Twenge
Positive The Washington Post One senses, picking up Twenge’s tome — 515 pages before you get to the appendix — an attempt to quell past criticisms ... Reading Twenge, I find myself sometimes nodding in recognition, sometimes numb with pessimism, rejection or denial.
Hadley Freeman
Positive The New York Times Book Review Freeman airs some provocative theories, exploring the idea that anorexia can be seen as a feminist rejection of all the womanly roles girls are expected to assume ... While acknowledging that research is nascent and scant, Freeman even goes so far as to wonder whether some percentage of today’s gender-dysphoric girls might have been yesterday’s anorexic girls — whether there seems to be a common root ... Anorexia is narrow and claustrophobic, just as was Freeman’s own life when she was in the grip of the disease. Freeman seems to be aware of this pitfall. She has brought to bear every ounce of her trademark clarity, precision and wit to render her own experience, and that of other women with anorexia, with the utmost specificity and sensitivity. And she has done a service to those struggling with this disorder. Whether anorexia is a compelling subject for a wider audience is an open question, and a subjective one. I personally found myself defiantly fetching a bowl of midday ice cream as I read, and longing for wider horizons, the kind that Freeman, after years marked by desperately seeking smallness, managed, thankfully, to find.
Kirsty Bell
Mixed New York Times Book Review Bell, a British-American art critic, undertakes a kind of investigation of the history of Berlin, as if to tether herself more tightly to the place now that her original link is gone ... Bell provides a vivid sense of Berlin’s physicality ... She branches out in impressionistic fashion to the city’s cast of characters, offering us tantalizing glimpses some of its most formative figures ... Bell is well aware of the potential pitfalls of conflating her personal history with that of such a fraught location ... Bell’s technique of showing her process results in a work that is deeply absorbing, even hypnotic. She turns to psychoanalysts for help in excavating the psyche of her adopted city ... When I encountered the book’s increasingly frequent mentions of feng shui, hidden \'energy\' and other such conceits...I went along with it, gamely, until suddenly, I couldn’t. My breaking point came in the final third, when Bell summons an astrologer who places dark stones in the corners of an oddly shaped room in Bell’s home, stones ... I found this turn in Bell’s highly original and atmospheric book more than a little disappointing. Up to this point, she has ably guided us on a poetic exploration of the layers and depths in this troubled, thrilling, world capital.
Sam Quinones
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... lacks the cohesion of Dreamland, a problem one senses early on. This, he tells us, is a book about fentanyl and methamphetamine and also about community efforts to combat addiction. Then why, one wonders, are we reading so much — five chapters — about OxyContin and the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, produced it, material that would have been at home in his last book? ... When Quinones tackles the newer problem of designer drugs, he does so with his usual depth ... Quinones depicts his subjects affectingly, but along with his rich reporting is the problem of excess. A natural storyteller, he applies those skills to such an array of characters that it is difficult to register their true significance to his larger narrative ... The least of us, Quinones is quick to emphasize, is in all of us. What he means is our searing vulnerability, simply by dint of being human. And that’s the point and the power of his work: to shine a bright light not only on the pathways by which drugs traverse this country, but also on the desperate pain that so many among us are in.
Rosecrans Baldwin
Positive Los Angeles Review of Books Baldwin seems comfortable with the idea that city-state is more metaphor than fact, but even as metaphor, repeatedly invoked, it can feel diffuse. Baldwin’s notion of Los Angeles as city-state is further watered down when he refers to LAX, the airport, as \'a city-state unto itself\' because it is large and has its own SWAT team and theme song ... Baldwin’s notion of Los Angeles as city-state ultimately feels more like pretext than argument. It’s an opportunity to take us on a tour of current-day Los Angeles, which Baldwin does in a series of sharply reported chapters. If they sometimes feel like not-quite-integrated pieces of magazine writing, that’s because at least three big sections of the book have previously appeared in other publications. But he holds the reader’s interest and writes with warmth and verve ... his writing on homelessness is some of the most effective in the book ... Baldwin’s conclusion comes down to one word: \'inequality\' ... it’s obvious. But Baldwin comes to the judgment honestly: the observation, like the rest of his book, is heartfelt. What makes a greater impression, though, is the peculiar mix he manages to convey along the way. It’s precisely Los Angeles’s fundamental ambiguity, its magnetic swirl of beauty and darkness, that makes books like Baldwin’s worth writing, and reading.
Carl L. Hart
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Hart’s argument that we need to drastically revise our current view of illegal drugs is both powerful and timely, but the question of addiction lingers in the background. It is not one he attempts to resolve ... Hart’s writing can turn from passionate and moral to what feels like score-settling, undercutting the tenor of his narrative. But when it comes to the legacy of this country’s war on drugs, we should all share his outrage.