About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Richard Price
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle His books, including the new Lazarus Man, are also masterworks of character, atmosphere, symbolism and whatever else those scribes over in the supposedly higher-tone literature section might throw at you ... Price...remains one of the most rewarding, compulsively readable fiction writers around.
Al Pacino
Positive The Los Angeles Times Discursively soulful ... The eccentricity of Sonny Boy is part of its charm, and the book’s distinctive voice speaks to a fruitful collaboration between Pacino and Itzkoff ... Shot through with what certainly feels like self-deprecating honesty to go with the well-worn Pacino swagger.
Daniel J Levitin
Positive The Boston Globe [The book] might be most valuable to the layperson when it gets more tangible and concrete ... These are the moments when the elements of Secret Chord come together in harmony, using specific examples and language that doesn’t intimidate. This is without a doubt an exemplary book of its kind, laden with scientific explanation of a subject just about everyone knows and loves on some level. Whether or not you enjoy it will depend largely on how you respond to the aforementioned questions Levitin poses near the outset.
Brian Vandemark
Positive The Los Angeles Times Meticulously researched and reported ... This is an admirably patient and thorough book, in which even the copious footnotes are worth poring over ... One can quibble with the amount of space VanDeMark devotes to Students for a Democratic Society and its radical, violent and cluelessly revolutionary offshoot, the Weathermen, both of which had only indirect impact on the events of May 4. But you can also see the context that the author is establishing.
Chris Nashawaty
Positive The Los Angeles Times It’s a promising premise, and The Future Was Now has no shortage of juicy storylines ... The author is not just a good reporter, but also an excellent and thoughtful critic, and the book’s breakneck pace underserves this skill set.
Bret Anthony Johnston
Positive The Los Angeles Times Like Shakespeare’s tragedy, a story of star-crossed lovers who fall victim to circumstances beyond their control ... The interviews, some friendly, some contentious, give the novel a polyphonic feel, a sense that the discussions and arguments continue to this day.
Ben Shattuck
Rave The Boston Globe Deeply resonant ... The stories in The History of Sound are laden with dry humor, genuine sadness, and careful pacing. Just when you think you know where you’re going, Shattuck creates an unexpected, often scenic detour ... Shattuck has a rare ability to write in a multitude of voices and styles, and an even rarer talent for bringing those voices into harmony.
John Ganz
Rave The Boston Globe Lively...argues with disarming vim ... Ganz does his most dogged work in the political trenches, particularly in dissecting what would come to be known as the culture wars ... A vivid tour.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle The book is a year-by-year march through the ’60s as viewed by newcomers to the corridors of power. But it’s also a rather sweet portrait of a devoted couple growing old together ... This is not a news-breaking book, and it’s not about dish; that’s not really the Kearns Goodwin brand. But it is eminently readable, appealing especially to anyone fascinated by the period covered, and a touching invitation to eavesdrop on a long marriage between two people who had an unusual level of access to presidential policy and personality.
Keith O'Brien
Rave The New York Times Book Review O’Brien has crafted a sort of American tragedy about an undersized athlete raised to win at all costs ... O’Brien deftly builds suspense and narrative friction.
Lionel Shriver
Positive The Boston Globe Her fiction bristles with discomfort, and her protagonists, not surprisingly, sail against stiff currents ... At its best the book works as a fantasy that hews uncomfortably close to today’s reality, where facts and the truth are selectively recognized at increasingly subjective whims. Shriver only nibbles at the political implications of all this, enough to make you wish for a bigger bite ... Shriver isn’t one to tip-toe around her subjects. She still knows how to poke the bear. In this case, the bear is us.
James Kaplan
Rave The Los Angeles Times A bracing reminder of when jazz represented a widely relevant culture ... Kaplan knows some music theory, enough to conjure the ideas behind specific styles and sounds without getting inaccessible. But mostly, he’s a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date ... It’s a compulsively readable work of fine synthesis and perspective that draws on others’ previous work and the author’s own interviews.
Kevin Baker
Rave The Boston Globe Wonderfully readable, both erudite and streetwise ... Baker’s approach is romantic but clear-eyed, idiosyncratic and veracious.
Paul Alexander
Rave The Boston Globe Bitter Crop benefits from a tight focus and a cinematic structure ... Alexander... captures some of the tragic beauty of Holiday’s life and art. But he also does justice to her innate toughness and survival instincts, and the work ethic that burned until her body finally gave out.
Simon Shuster
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Authoritative and engaging ... Wonks and experts will get something out of “The Showman,” but the book is most valuable to those who know little about the war and seek greater context and background. Shuster’s skills as a longtime magazine journalist serve him well here. He writes with clarity and immediacy about matters that could easily descend into centuries of history and reams of military strategy. The Showman has plenty of both, but always in the service of a tight narrative that deftly toggles from past to present and back again.
Andrew Pettegree
Rave The Boston Globe This is a big, eclectic, eccentric, and discursive book ... This is a long, loping read, a campaign to reveal functions of reading that we often take for granted. The results are expansive, rather than reductive, and well worth the fight, as long as you’re willing to learn a little about Prussian history along the way.
Judith Tick
Rave The Los Angeles Times Incisive, doggedly researched ... Tick...proves an ideal guide to Fitzgerald’s perpetual progress ... With few survivors of Fitzgerald’s era left to interview, Tick makes vigorous use of press coverage, yielding particularly fruitful results from Black newspapers and periodicals that covered seemingly every move the singer made ... This is a book that clearly took a long time to research and write; its insights are deeply ingrained, its observations carefully rendered rather than overstated ... Vivid.
James Ellroy
Positive The Los Angeles Times Fact, fiction and conspiracy blur together until you can’t tell which is which, and you almost cease to care. The meticulous detail accumulates with a reportorial verve, each small action adding to the big picture ... [Monroe] is depicted as a pill-popping, ditzy dilettante, deluded and drunk and self-centered and into some very shady stuff. All of which might have been true on some level, but The Enchanters exudes a sort of pervy and even necrophiliac delight in its postmortem ... But this is what you get with Ellroy. The fever dream and the undiluted sleaze, in which he is far from the only crime novelist to indulge. Here, however, he’s messing with an icon (not to mention two popular political figures who met tragic deaths). The transgressions feel more severe, and, it must be said, more exciting. You might not want to live in Ellroy Land, but The Enchanters makes for a pretty wild visit.
Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
Rave The Boston Globe You’d be forgiven if this doesn’t strike you as the making of a great novel. But Dayswork, a spry, compact book by the husband-and-wife team of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, is quite weird and wonderful, a novel in verse that immediately casts a spell and keeps it going until the last little missive. It’s the kind of book you miss as soon as it’s over, its sway and power nearly as mysterious and unlikely as that of a leviathan tome about whaling ... Vivid ... This is the rhythm of Dayswork, somehow jagged and smooth simultaneously, quotidian and deeply felt, and capable of lulling the reader into a sort of literary trance. It’s a nimble merging of poetry and prose, written by a poet and a novelist in perfect synch.
Peter Heller
Positive The Boston Globe Heller writes in lean, descriptive, contemplative prose that often reflects a spirit of solitude ... The thrills of The Last Ranger lean to the quiet side, but they should resonate with any thoughtful reader who considers the human relationship to the world that was here before we arrived, and, hopefully, will be here after we shuffle off this mortal coil.
Thea Glassman
Mixed The Boston Globe Thea Glassman proves a sharp observer of the era ... She also proves a gush-prone fan, and these two qualities — critical observation and gee-whiz fervor — don’t always get along ... The tone of the book often veers into breathless excitement, which is fine when it doesn’t stand in for smart analysis ... This is frustrating largely because Glassman can also be an astute observer of her subject ... What’s missing is intertextual analysis, or any kind of sustained, unifying argument that might have made the book more than a collection of features on some memorable series.
Nat Segaloff
Positive The Los Angeles Times Dutiful, soup-to-nuts ... Segaloff argues, convincingly, that The Exorcist is about faith ... Segaloff...quotes Kermode extensively, adding some intellectual heft to what is otherwise a pretty straightforward procedural.
Colson Whitehead
Rave The Los Angeles Times Both deceptively substantive and sneakily funny, a wise journey through Harlem days and nights as lived by Ray Carney, a conscientious furniture salesman and family man who happens to run a little crooked ... Whitehead has always had a sharp instinct for the workings of culture ... Whitehead’s New York of the ‘70s is a fully realized universe down to the most meticulous details, from the constant sirens and bodega drug fronts to a sweltering, abandoned biscuit factory ... A...reminder, as if we still needed one, that crime fiction can be great literature. These books are as resonant and finely observed as anything Whitehead has written.
Scott C. Johnson
Rave The Los Angeles Times Johnson’s book is a shape-shifter ... Despite the thematic depths it mines, it is a rocket of a book that can and should be consumed in a headlong dash for maximum effect ... Johnson may slip here and there as he slides down his chosen rabbit holes, but his gambits are more than worth the reader’s while ... One hell of a yarn.
Alex Pappademas
Rave Los Angeles Times Wry, playful but deeply incisive ... A gonzo helping of music criticism dessert ... The best part is that it illuminates details the rest of us may have glossed over for years.
David Grann
Rave The Boston Globe [A] propulsive, finely detailed seafaring saga ... This is a ripping yarn disguised as an acute study of group psychology, or perhaps the other way around. However you categorize The Wager, it is a remarkable book ... Grann guides us through this process, step by step, storm by storm, man by man, in prose that the writers he references, including Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, would appreciate. The book invites landlubbers in with vivid descriptions of life at sea, peppered with explanations of phrases and idioms given us by that life.
Jeff Benedict
Rave The Los Angeles Times There’s no shortage of material for a biographer to chronicle the current Los Angeles Laker, and Jeff Benedict’s comprehensive new LeBron does a masterful job of shaping that material into a cohesive and propulsive whole ... Benedict clearly likes James, but he’s been around long enough... to steer far clear of hagiography ... The author’s reporting here is exhaustive; he interviewed almost 250 people for the book. The public record on James is voluminous, and Benedict used it extensively. However, this is no clip job ... LeBron isn’t just great sportswriting, it’s also vivid narrative journalism ... Benedict’s greatest feat here might be the way he cuts through both the public hysteria surrounding James and the superstar’s own protective field to paint a portrait of a man in full.
Theresa Runstedtler
Rave The Los Angeles Times [A] wise, engaging and frankly overdue survey of a crucial moment in sports history ... The stroke of honesty that guides Black Ball is its insistence that our perceptions of race affect how we view the game, and that you simply can’t divorce sports from the times in which they are played — and the audiences for whom they’re played ... Black Ball is a timely read at a moment when professional athletes are more outspoken than ever on social issues, and when it’s clear that sports and society are inextricably linked.
Malcolm Harris
Mixed The San Francisco Chronicle This is less a history of capitalism than a condemnation. With its tangents and excursions...you may find yourself coming back to the same question: What exactly does this have to do with Palo Alto? ... Fortunately, Harris has an unignorable and caustically engaging attitude to go with his verbosity ... Palo Alto doesn’t stay...memoirish, which is kind of a shame; the story of how the town fostered Harris’ anti-capitalist fervor would surely make for a ripping yarn. But he’s got bigger stories to tell ... Harris’ stridency is baked into Palo Alto; there is no separating the tone from the tale. But the book usually comes alive when he’s delving into people, rather than ideas, and he remembers that he’s writing a story, not a treatise ... A harder edit would have helped on both the micro and macro levels. Harris has a way of piling clause upon clause upon clause, and his focus wanes as he gets stuck in the weeds of a subject. He could have used someone to remind him that a 500-page book might meet more readers than a doorstop.
Thomas Mallon
Rave The Boston Globe Smart ... Much of the fun in Up With the Sun comes from Mallon’s treatment of the parade of showbiz players that cross paths with Kallman ... Up With the Sun has its cake and eats it, too. It’s an ode to the more poisonous elements of show business that it also manages to bask in the ridiculousness of it all. You won’t like Dick Kallman. But good luck taking your eyes off him.
De'Shawn Charles Winslow
Rave The Los Angeles Times ... a murder mystery that doubles as a savvy examination of race and class ... “Decent People” practically turns its own pages, creating in the reader an insatiable curiosity that matches Jo’s own. Winslow proves able to simultaneously drill down and step back, letting the details add up and weaving the grievances of one character into the next until you don’t know whom to trust.
Jeff Guinn
Rave The Houston Chronicle Gripping ... Guinn...savors the task of slicing through that fog. He tells stories we thought we knew and makes us realize we really didn’t ... These books are laden with context. Guinn rarely casts judgment; he doesn’t have to. He knows when the facts are damning enough.
Aidan Levy
Rave Los Angeles Times A whopper, nearly 800 pages of deep-dive research ... A vivid picture of this milieu, its buzzing nightlife and its varieties of temptation waiting behind what seems every door. Throughout Saxophone Colossus, [Levy] weds his extensive research to a feel for detail and narrative; the book is certainly long, but it has too much great reporting to be dry ... Levy is excellent on the history of calypso and the late-1950s American craze for the genre.
Cormac McCarthy
Positive The Boston Globe In contrast to the weight of The Passenger, the slim Stella Maris, which reads like a two-character play without stage directions, can be read in one determined sitting ... Stella Maris reads more like an expansion of ideas explored in The Passenger than a book in and of itself. But because this is McCarthy, whose dialogue can be as transcendent as his descriptions, it’s still a welcome postscript.
Jane Smiley
Rave USA Today Jane Smiley paints such vivid imagery with her language that it’s easy for her novels to conjure memories of various movies and television ... But the book remains Smiley through and through, with clarity, deceptive wit and moral compass working at the service of a larger idea ... Among Smiley’s many gifts is an eye for the cycles of the natural world, and how the cycles affect her characters.
Quentin Tarantino
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ... an opinionated, compulsively readable appreciation of the grimy, generally lurid movies of his ’70s youth ... To his credit, Tarantino, whose own movies skew toward the gleefully sordid, doesn’t just gush over these films. He offers his own highly subjective criticisms – he’s not the biggest Paul Newman fan – and, in the better chapters, he even does some reporting ... Tarantino can also be wickedly funny ... Tarantino knows what he likes, and he engages the reader with ease. Cinema Speculation is, at minimum, a whole lot of fun.
RJ Smith
Positive The Los Angeles Times It’s got a rock ‘n’ roll tone, for better and worse, but it still manages to bring Berry into sharp focus ... Smith works best in the realms of cultural criticism and history, and Berry, who died in 2017, offers plenty of material. Sometimes Smith is a little too eager to flash his hep credentials...Nevertheless, he has a firm grasp of Berry’s meaning, and he tells the story with a sense of color his subject deserves.
Lynn Steger Strong
Positive USA Today Strong bores in on each character, each couple, with acute emotional intelligence, crafting a chamber play atmosphere in the vein of Henrik Ibsen or Ingmar Bergman. Once we figure out who’s who, who’s married to whom and which kids belong to which couple, the character arcs begin to intersect and the sketches give way to frescoes. Flight doesn’t just juggle the interior lives of six protagonists with great dexterity; it also carefully delineates who these people are to each other, and where anger and jealousy might clip the wings of their better angels ... sweeps forward in a rich flurry of details.
Bono
Rave The Los Angeles Times Defined largely by humility. This is an introspective story written by a man whose spirit is never far removed from the sadness and grief of his childhood ... Honest and direct ... Surrender is more a van of a book than a private plane. It shrinks more ego than it inflates. Bono makes no bones about his outsized ambitions, but there’s always a fallible human being behind the big plans and then the superstardom ... By no means operatic. There’s a casual charm to the memoir, a feeling of being led through caverns of story by a guide with some things to get off his chest ... This is the rare rock star memoir written by a rock star who, you get the impression, could have been a writer ... U2 fanatics might already know much of the material in Surrender. For the rest of us, there’s something to discover in every chapter. Bono has a gift for making even the unattainable seem relatable ... He’s humble, even self-effacing. He might be fun to have a beer with. He is very much of this Earth.
Cormac McCarthy
Rave The Boston Globe ... characteristically bleak and daunting ... one of those sentences beautiful enough to stop you in your tracks, its structural perfection, vivid imagery, and apocalyptic foreboding a perfect encapsulation of what makes McCarthy, well, McCarthy. Never for the faint of heart, the writer who has wrung hard, often bloody poetry from the Western and the end of the world has never been less compromising, or more challenging. Now 89, he’s not going gentle into that good night ... don’t look for any answers. This isn’t the kind of conspiracy that leads to a conclusion. It’s more an amorphous manifestation of a hostile universe ... a stubborn novel that dares you to like it, written with a verve and mastery of language that make it hard not to ... One of the best things about McCarthy is his willingness to interrupt the doom with a rimshot ... McCarthy’s world remains no country for resolution, except for the inevitable one that concludes six feet under. In the meantime, the horizon is obscured by the darkening rim of the world.
John Irving
Positive The Boston Globe Irving refuses to be embarrassed by anything, a quality that fits the tenor of his work ... The Last Chairlift is eminently readable, stocked with characters and relationships easy to invest in, even when things get a little queasy making. Irving has been cranking out novels for 54 years, establishing a consistent generosity of spirit that continues through his most recent book. If anyone has earned the right to deliver one more gargantuan tome, it’s him. For readers it’s once more down the hill, with a haste that belies the enormity of the task.
Adam Hochschild
Rave San Francisco Chronicle Hochschild compiles ample research and evidence to remind readers of a shameful chapter in U.S. history that has echoes in many conflicts since ... Hochschild realizes that the tragedy comes with a dash of absurdity, even comedy ... American Midnight is a potent reminder of what happens when open discourse is systemically punished.
Jann S. Wenner
Mixed The Los Angeles Times Some memoirs are deeply introspective; others amount to victory laps sandwiched between covers. Jann Wenner’s Like a Rolling Stone falls firmly in the second category ... The book is also a font of gossip, befitting a man who also owned Us Weekly for three decades ... sometimes reads like a boomer greatest hits compilation.
Beth Macy
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Macy tells these stories largely by ceding the stage to her subjects, addicts and workers alike. One of her strengths as a journalist is doing the reporting and then knowing when to get out of the way. Raising Lazarus, like Dopesick, never turns into The Beth Macy Show. The stories occasionally come a little fast and furious, making it difficult to tell one player from another, but everybody gets a say, even the Kiwanis Club president who suggests the overdosed be left to die so their organs can be harvested ... There’s still no end in sight for the opioid crisis, but as long as Macy remains on the job, we can count on compassionate dispatches from the front lines.
Marianne Wiggins
Rave USA Today ... [a] legitimately great American novel ... This is a big, bold book, generous of spirit and packed with prose that gleefully breaks the rules ... Wiggins’ gifts are many, but most important here is her knack for weaving the personal into larger historical currents, in this case domestic concerns during World War II ... has many modes, ranging from tragedy to screwball comedy ... a seamless, inspired whole ... Wiggins’ writing glides off the page in an onslaught of stylistic flourishes writers are often told not to use: italics, consecutive colons, ellipses, em dashes, paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. But there’s nothing terribly showy about Properties of Thirst. It speaks to the heart as well as the head and conjures characters to whom you won’t want to say goodbye.
Ron Shelton
Rave USA Today Eminently readable ... A down-and-dirty account of how the unlikely 1988 classic was conceived, made and sold, soup to nuts, from idealistic plans to corporate reality. Its ground-level tone and attention to detail strip away the romance of moviemaking, with only minimal rancor. In contemporary parlance, Shelton keeps it real.
Howard Bryant
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Bryant, a senior writer for ESPN and author of an acclaimed biography of Henry Aaron, proves astute on what made Henderson tick and what the media continually got wrong about the mercurial star ... Bryant does some of his best work along the fault line of race and culture, an area he covers well in most of his writing. He addresses the Great Migration that brought Black athletes including Frank Robinson, Bill Russell and Vada Pinson to the Bay Area. He calls out the racist overtones of those who made fun of the way Henderson spoke ... Henderson ultimately had the last laugh: Today he’s seen as an all-time great. Bryant’s book shows how he got there, and the hits he had to take along the way.
Justin Tinsley
Mixed Los Angeles Times At its best, Justin Tinsley’s new biography, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him, pays tribute to that creativity — and to the short life and blinding talent of the rapper who loved it when you called him Big Poppa ... The book excels at big-picture analysis, taking the mission in its subtitle seriously. In lesser moments, it piles up malformed sentences and typos at an alarming clip, but if you can get past those, it serves as a solid and incisive if rarely revelatory summary of a hip-hop legend’s life and art ... Tinsley doesn’t break any new news on the double-barreled tragedy of Biggie and Tupac Shakur ... The author isn’t an investigative reporter, nor does he claim to be, and the subject has been examined about as intensively as any celebrity murder mystery of the past 30 years ... One of the new biography’s problems is that this has all been covered elsewhere, including in other biographies ... Then there’s the error-prone syntax — infelicities in editing and writing that add up quickly ... Sometimes the same phrases are repeated in the space of a single page. In small doses, such errors don’t matter much. Here they appear over and over again, taking the reader’s head out of the story ... The book is stronger on the macro level, filling in the context of Biggie’s life with sharp sketches of the people, events and social currents that accompanied Biggie’s rise ... It Was All a Dream makes a fine starting point for those looking to discover what all the fuss was about and why Biggie still matters.
Don Winslow
Rave USA Today Winslow knows how to set a dozen subplots and characters in motion and keep them moving ... You get caught up in one subplot, then watch it morph into another. Winslow is a master plotter and shaper of characters. You don’t read City on Fire so much as you let it take you for a ride ... Winslow leaves this story ripe for further chapters – it feels like the first part of a trilogy – and, as usual, he leaves the reader wanting more. You wouldn’t want to spend time with these gangsters in real life, but they’re top-notch company on the page.
Keith O'Brien
Rave Boston Globe [A] propulsive account ... A masterpiece of narrative detail that could spring only from asking the right questions of the right people and digging through mountains of research. It reads like a thriller, but only because O’Brien has done the legwork necessary to put the pieces together. The book is first and foremost a mighty work of historical journalism, rooted in the stories of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, and discovering that they’re not so ordinary after all ... Paradise Falls is as much about the human response as the disaster itself ... Similar stories, such as “A Civil Action” and “Erin Brockovich,” focus on individual heroes who risk it all to take on corporate polluters. O’Brien does something more difficult. He makes the entire community his protagonist. He introduces each character as a novelist might, developing them and tracing their actions carefully, allowing them to become parts of the bigger picture ... Paradise Falls is a gloriously quotidian thriller about people forced to find and use their inner strength. After all these years, they are fortunate to have a chronicler as focused and thoughtful as O’Brien. He brings their courage back to life.
Azar Nafisi
Rave USA Today Nafisi’s dispatches are eloquent essays on literature’s power to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In addressing them to one she loves dearly, she provides a built-in layer of warmth and understanding. But she still hits hard ... Nafisi gets to the heart of the matter in the very first chapter ... You could say Nafisi is prescient, but the themes she’s tackling are timeless, older even than Plato’s The Republic, which she also addresses.
Victoria Kastner
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ... handsome and comprehensive ... Kastner, the former official historian of Hearst Castle, doesn’t have much dazzle to work with in Morgan’s personal life. But she does an excellent job chronicling the work that made her a pioneer architect and engineer ... Kastner’s words, along with Alexander Vertikoff’s photography, provide a sweeping overview of Morgan’s vast, versatile body of work. You’ll want to get a hard copy of this book; e-readers don’t do justice to the photos or the layout. It’s a volume to hold in your hands and savor. When you’re done, you might consider a tour of the many Morgan structures throughout the Bay Area.
Emily Maloney
Rave USA Today Somehow, she never seems to lapse into bleak cynicism. Even when Maloney is caustic, even when she observes and describes with a gonzo spirit, she remains sympathetic to the people caught up in the system ... Maloney has an uncanny ability to recall and elucidate moments that couldn’t have been very clear at the time ... Maloney is able to slow things down, to capture them in her mind, and then on paper ... Maloney’s book isn’t a history so much as an inside view of the medical-financial complex ... Cost of Living is never less than bracingly real, whether Maloney’s subject is herself or the medical field she knows as both patient and professional. The book is sure to haunt your imagination the next time you enter the labyrinthine health care system and face the expenses, financial and otherwise.
Carl Erik Fisher
Rave Boston Globe One of those hybrid history/memoirs that illuminates an important subject through personal experience. Fisher digs deep into the history of addiction ... Doggedly researched, layered with empathy, The Urge pulls back multiple curtains at once in examining an ailment that will likely never go away ... Fisher devotes several pages to the subject of recovery (his own included). His treatment of Alcoholics Anonymous is concise, evenhanded, and even novel in whom it brings into the picture ... The Urge contains a wealth of such research and insight, rendered with a gimlet eye and a physician’s care. Addicts who make it to the other side often feel they have survived to fulfill a higher purpose. The Urge qualifies as just such an accomplishment, an inspired dive into a condition that, in one way or another, touches us all.
Bob Spitz
Rave USA Today The whole story, the glory and the mayhem, the train wreck and the true bliss ... [A] sprawling account ... The good, the bad and the ugly coexist in the Led Zeppelin story, and Spitz knows well enough to report and tell it all ... Spitz...gives nobody a pass. Hovering above all the parties and all the jams and the richly detailed accounts of creating each album is an abundance of abominable behavior that only grew worse as Zeppelin’s fame exploded ... This is one group portrait that doesn’t flatter.
Kat Chow
Rave USA Today The book reads like a memory album, of enduring images of Chow\'s mother and of family treks and private jokes ... Seeing Ghosts is no tearjerker. The book’s emotions are restrained, dry, even (an inheritance from Chow’s father?). It doesn’t manipulate, nor does it seek to recreate an idyllic past ... As Chow grows older in these pages, she also grows more open and willing, enough so that she was able to write this fine book. We all have our ghosts that need witnessing, for their sake and for ours. In baring her memories and her soul, Chow reminds us why this task is so important, and how it lets us heal.
Daniel Sherrell
Rave The Boston Globe ... bracing ... It’s both inspiring—Sherrell is an immensely talented young writer who cares deeply about his subject—and dispiriting: Sherrell knows this stuff backward and forward, and he isn’t hopeful ... In tone and structure, Warmth resembles James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, ... These are brave books built on an understanding that some battles are worth fighting, some boulders are worth pushing up the hill no matter how many times they come crashing down. Some of the images in Warmth resonate like post-apocalyptic fiction ... Warmth should be required reading for anyone who questions the depth, tenacity, and critical thinking skills of millennials ... an existential yawp, freighted with the ballast of knowledge and intent.
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Rave The Star Tribune ... one of those books that delights in detours, shining its spotlight on one protagonist for hundreds of pages, introducing another character in the margins, then foregrounding that character throughout the next section. But they all live along the same continuum, with the themes of autonomy, caste, color and education carrying over from section to section ... race is never a simple matter in Love Songs, not even among those who want it to be. Jeffers has a lot to say here, and at 816 pages she gives herself ample space to say it. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is an investment, but a worthy one. It\'s the kind of epic that deserves its own place in the sun.
Emma Brodie
Rave Los Angeles Times The book is very much based on the love affair and mutual muse-hood of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, leading lights of the folk-rock world and onetime residents of L.A.’s Edenic Laurel Canyon. But from the very start, it stretches out and becomes its own thing. Brodie works with big themes — individuation, mental illness, legacy, self-destruction and redemption — but her touch is lighter than an onshore breeze ... Brodie, formerly an editor at Little, Brown, has a wicked knack for locating the tone of various music types: journalists, producers, A&R scouts and, of course, prodigiously talented singer-songwriters ... You can tell when a novelist truly loves her heroes and despises her villains ... But Ursa Major is plotted so tightly, its characters so vividly rendered, that you barely notice the author’s thumb on the scale ... Songs in Ursa Major also weaves in a deep understanding of the connection between creativity and madness ... There’s something about Ursa Major that suggests a mythology, a hero’s journey in which the hero is a woman with immense musical gifts and the music business is a beast to overcome and master.
Clint Smith
Rave USA Today Smith’s purpose is never to put anyone on the spot. This isn’t Borat. What he does, quite successfully, is show that we whitewash our history at our own risk. That history is literally still here, taking up acres of space, memorializing the past, and teaching us how we got to be where we are, and the way we are. Bury it now and it will only come calling later.
Carol Smith
Rave The Star Tribune Most grief tales turn inward. The author feels compelled to figure out why he or she has joined the worst club in the world, why death has come knocking and how to survive the insanity that follows. These books are written out of emotional and existential need. Surely some purpose will grow from this tragedy. Surely it\'s not all for naught. Carol Smith\'s \"Crossing the River\" checks all of those boxes. It\'s a shattering account of the brief life and sudden death of Smith\'s 7-year-old son, Christopher. Smith gleaned wisdom from her excruciating pain, and she\'s generous enough to share it with the reader. But that\'s just the jumping-off point ... The book\'s structure leaves room for Smith\'s story, which she weaves in and out of her subjects\' tales. There\'s a lot of pain here, and a lot of guilt, which is rarely far behind grief. But there\'s also, to borrow the title of a Tracy Kidder book, strength in what remains. And hope, without which the rest would be academic.
Glenn Frankel
Rave USA Today ... a masterfully structured study bursting with detail and context ... revealing details permeate Frankel’s book, touching on the making of the movie (you’ll likely never think about casting in the same way), the individuals involved, and the social history of the time and place. Frankel puts it all together with narrative verve, telling a propulsive tale about creativity, commerce and loss.
Emma Glass
Rave The Star Tribune ... [a] haunting dynamo novel ... Laura’s mind overflows with the language of her creator, Emma Glass, which means she floats along on a sea of high-wire alliteration, jazzy rhythms and tactile description. Laura may be inundated by gloom, but her gloom really zings ... expertly mixes long, loping sentences with short declarations and fragments ... [Laura] has vivid dreams of drowning that make the pages feel waterlogged. She observes everything in the minutest detail, especially as it concerns her body. Laura sweats and you feel you’re doing the same, becoming acutely aware of every drop. Her skin itches and you start scratching ... a pungent piece of writing, tactile and sensory to the extreme ... This is a feverish read, short and immersive, rich with dense imagery and symbolism ... What it doesn’t really have is a narrative, at least not one that you can latch onto with any assurance that it will take you somewhere. You can still get lost in these pages, but it’s Laura’s interior life, not her story, that pulls you in.
Corey Sobel
Positive The Star Tribune In 2013, University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam made headlines when he came out as gay. Sam’s teammates were reportedly supportive, and he even ended up being selected in the NFL draft. But for a player to come out amid the macho trappings of big-time football was a big deal, even if other gay players had certainly taken the field without making their sexuality public.The Redshirt, Corey Sobel’s deceptively breezy debut novel about life at an elite, bucolic Southern college, tells the story of one of those other players, the ones who deem it safest to stay in the closet ... Like other great football novels — North Dallas Forty comes to mind — The Redshirt doesn’t flinch from the double-edged sword dangling over the sport’s culture ... I wish there were a little more of The Redshirt, which ends too soon for my taste. The characters and their conflicts are rich enough to warrant further exploration. But this is still a very strong debut novel that draws jagged, vivid links between sport and society.
Brittany K. Barnett
Rave The Houston Chronicle ... isn’t your ordinary memoir. It carries the force of urgent action, and it calls attention to sentencing laws that must be read to be believed ... Most important, it bears the toil and triumph of freedom hard won. That’s a quality that readers will have a hard time taking for granted after reading these pages.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Positive Houston Chronicle \"If Abdurraquib stopped there, with his thoughts and feelings about Tribe, Go Ahead in the Rain would be a fine book. But he doesn’t. He goes deep into ’90s hip-hop, perhaps the genre’s most fertile era ... Go Ahead in the Rain packs a lot into its 206 pages.\
Lou Berney
Rave The Dallas Morning News November Road...tells a propulsive, romantic and danger-laden story centered on two people taking to the open road, running from past mistakes ... a crime novel with a rare combination of emotional weight and gunshot speed ... Berney gets inside his characters so gradually and gracefully that November Road easily transcends genre conventions. All that, and he keep things moving at a lively clip ... November Road is indeed something different. There\'s no shortage of JFK fiction, but this one belongs up there with the best.
Susan Orlean
Positive The Dallas Morning News \"The Library Book is also a love letter of sorts to libraries and reading ... Orlean makes such delights palpable and sensory, much as she captures the tragedy of a building full of books going up in flames. She provides a brief history of organized book burnings, going back to 213 B.C., when the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to burn any history book that contradicted his version of the past ... If you pick up The Library Book, whether you buy it or check it out at your local branch, chances are you\'re deeply invested in the subject, and that you\'ll tell a like-minded friend or two. But this isn\'t just a testament to the world of books. The Library Book is a great read in and of itself.\
Saul Austerlitz
Positive The Dallas Morning News Austerlitz...recounts the rushed, slapdash planning for the show, which didn\'t even have a venue until a couple days before curtain. He dissects the disastrous plan to have the Hells Angels police the 300,000 people at the free concert, and to pay them in beer. He dives into the brutal, virulently racist culture of the Angels and their uneasy alliance with the counterculture. He marvels that the Grateful Dead, the band largely responsible for hiring the Angels in the first place, managed to erase their role in whole debacle, starting with their decision to scamper away and refuse to play their set ... But the book\'s beating heart lies with Hunter and his family. Austerlitz spent time with Hunter\'s sister, Dixie Ward, and her daughter, Taammi Parker, who had been taught to never discuss Hunter and his tragic end. Hunter\'s mother, Altha, suffered from schizophrenia, and the disease ravaged other members of the family as well. So did the permanent absence of a beloved family member.\
Kevin Powers
Rave The Dallas Morning News \"With poetic and nimble language that brings to mind another student of literary violence, Cormac McCarthy, Powers, 37, creates a drama with deep roots in America\'s struggles with race, sex and commerce. Robiou, the plantation owner Powers grew up hearing about, is now Antony Levallois, a quietly tyrannical man with the foresight to see potential riches in the upcoming railroad age. A small-time slave owner named Bob Reid stands in his way, but Reid is soon getting his body and spirit blown apart in the war as his teen daughter, Emily, waits behind. Amid this psychodrama, two slaves, Rawls and Nurse, fall in love and plot a future that might just be impossible to attain in the Old South.\
Don Graham
Positive The Dallas Morning News ...a lively study of a book and movie that helped define the image of Texas in the last century. Graham looks at both the Edna Ferber novel (which Texas hated) and the George Stevens movie (which Texas loved). The difference between the two? The novel, as Wright explains, \'popularized the image of Texas millionaires as greedy but colorful provincials, whose fortunes were built largely on luck rather than hard work.\' The movie softened those edges and yielded something in which the state could take pride ... Graham’s book is more specific in its focus, with many of the pages devoted to the interactions between the movie’s stars — James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor — and their determined director, George Stevens. Within this framework, however, lurks the question of Texan identity, and the state’s aversion to being messed with ... Giant isn’t a paean to the state, but it doesn’t eliminate Ferber’s more acidic touches, especially where racism against Mexicans is involved.
Lawrence Wright
Rave The Dallas Morning News \"God Save Texas, as the title suggests, is the work of a man who loves Texas’ uniqueness but finds himself increasingly dismayed by its politics and social policies ... The push-pull between homegrown admiration and deep disappointment fuels God Save Texas with literary tension ... God Save Texas was hatched when Wright’s editor at The New Yorker, David Remnick, asked Wright to explain his home state. But the book succeeds by proving this task impossible ... Wright’s words could speak for both Texas and America. American exceptionalism is a sturdy component of our national mythology, a reminder that we consider ourselves different from other nations. You can call it a reactionary myth, as many have, but you can’t deny its hold on the imagination.\
Jesmyn Ward
Rave The Dallas Morning News This is a lyrical howl of a book that knows exactly when to go quiet and when to make its cries almost unbearable. It's a story of unfinished business, for both a country still struggling to live up to its ideals and for the ghosts that walk through these pages ... The past is its own character in Sing, Unburied, Sing, ready to burst in without a moment's notice and remind everyone it never really went away. If William Faulkner mined the South for gothic, stream-of-consciousness tragedy, and Toni Morrison conjured magical realism from the corroding power of the region's race hatred, then Ward is a worthy heir to both. This is not praise to be taken lightly. Ward has the command of language and the sense of place, the empathy and the imagination, to carve out her own place among the literary giants.
Ann Powers
Rave The Dallas Morning News ...a lively study stationed at the intersection of the musical and the erotic … The real treasures here are the ones you probably don't know about. There's a real sense of scholarly discovery in Good Booty, a willingness to go beyond the obvious and mess with conventional wisdom, especially in the book's revelatory first half … The book, which takes its title from original lyrics in Little Richard's ‘Tutti Frutti,’ touches on matters of race, technology, gender, cultural mores, and, of course, sex. To Powers, a longtime music critic who now works for NPR, the subject of sensuality runs deep.
Glenn Frankel
Positive The Dallas Morning News \"The blacklist has provided grist for many books, including Victor Navasky\'s seminal study Naming Names. But Frankel\'s book feels fresh nonetheless. Using newly discovered records, he tells the story through the prism of a beloved Hollywood movie. He spotlights the major players — Foreman, producer Stanley Kramer, star Gary Cooper and director Fred Zinnemann — and deftly loops them all into the bigger picture.\
Randall Fuller
Positive The Dallas Morning News Fuller's book finds its climactic peaks in such moments, as towering intellects grapple with the implications of big ideas ... My favorite parts of The Book That Changed America are its digressions, the character sketches and tributaries that flow through the bigger picture ... Fuller connects these characters and episodes to Darwin with varying levels of success; at 250 pages The Book That Changed America feels a bit too short, and you're left wondering if it could use just a little more thematic glue. But that barely detracts from its larger pleasures, or the validity of its premise.
Brian Jay Jones
Positive The Dallas Morning News Jones' book reminds us that Lucas saw the promise of digital filmmaking before just about anyone, and consistently put his own riches on the line to make that promise a reality ... You're also reminded why it became so easy for true Star Wars believers to dislike him ... he left a Chewbacca-size footprint on the culture. Jones overstates this case a bit.
Dan Slater
Positive The Dallas Morning News ...[an] evenhanded, exhaustively reported and frighteningly intimate snapshot of a dark, bloody corner of the drug trade ... Slater isn't interested in making excuses for Cardona. He knows his subject is a murderer. He also knows, as a writer, that Cardona is a rich character, a popular, handsome kid who decided killing people would be a good way to make some money and live a life of plenty. And he knew an anti-drug lecture would make for a pretty boring read.
Beth Macy
Rave The Dallas Morning News Macy is a digger and a listener, as all great reporters are. That means combing archives for research and old newspaper stories. It means taking the time to foster trust ... Truevine isn't just an obscured chapter of American history; it's also a peek inside a dogged reporter's process.
Lawrence Wright
Rave The Dallas Morning News The Austin writer is equally adept at home and abroad, quizzing American officials and international players. And even when he zooms in on policy, as he frequently does, the human side of this ongoing and lethal drama always takes precedence. Wright may be an expert, but he doesn't expect you to be. A dash of empathy and an inquisitive mind will do just fine.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Rave The Dallas Morning News \"Sun makes for an emotionally devastating read, but Dennis-Benn nurtures her rocky terrain with generous amounts of love and compassion ... Delores takes her place among the most craven maternal models in all of literature...She\'s a fully developed, loathsome and irresistible villain ... Reading Here Comes the Sun is like listening to a bravura musical composition of varying themes and time signatures ... a novel that conjures something transcendent from the darker corners of human nature.\
Toni Morrison
Positive The Dallas Morning News It’s as hard as ever to pick nits in Morrison’s writing. Every page contains at least one passage of breathtaking prose, a lyrical flow accentuated by stark imagery and laden with poetic contrasts ... My only complaint with God Help the Child? I wish there were more of it. Like her previous novel, Home in 2013, God Help the Child checks in under 200 pages. If it were anyone else we’d just call it a novella, but the word seems to belittle Morrison’s stature and gift. The writing is crisp, the narrative economical, and a new Morrison book is always cause for celebration. But some of the late-breaking plot developments feel orphaned by the novel’s brevity and eagerness to bring Bride’s denouement.
Don DeLillo
Rave The Dallas Morning News DeLillo is near the top of his game in Zero K, which comes about as close to science fiction as he gets. His primary obsessions are well represented, including the machinery of death, our efforts to forestall inevitable mortality and the fickle relationship between language and meaning. At times Zero K reads like literary theory in the form of fiction, with one major caveat: DeLillo substitutes the obtuse jargon of theory with bracingly crisp prose that leaps off the page...That exquisite command of language is what we’ve come to expect over DeLillo’s 45 years of writing novels.
Ethan Canin
Positive The Dallas Morning News A Doubter’s Almanac flags a little down the stretch, as so many novels of this length do. Milo’s swirl to the bottom of the drain is a long way down. But Canin never loses sight of redemption’s possibility, and the fact that it lies within reach of everyone. It’s this idea that keeps you turning pages, and that helps push A Doubter’s Almanac far beyond the realm of formula.