About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sebastian Smee
Rave The New York Times Book Review Deeply researched and suavely written ... Smee has a gimlet eye, a seductive style and a novelist’s feel for character and incident ... Smee has written an inspiring book.
Jeremy Eichler
Rave The Boston Globe Erudite, passionately argued, and extraordinarily moving ... Some of Eichler’s most fascinating pages are devoted to Arnold Schoenberg’s searing \'A Survivor from Warsaw\' ... Poses an eloquent challenge to readers.
Mark O'Connell
Rave The New York Times Book Review \"Doubt is the dominant key of Mark O’Connell’s exhilarating A Thread of Violence, a probing portrait of one of the most notorious murderers in recent Irish history ... O’Connell periodically interrupts his narration with what he calls \'meta ruminations\' on such matters as truth and doubt. Eschewing the novelistic conventions of so many true-crime accounts, with their shifting points of view and you-were-there immediacy, he adopts instead the skeptical tone of the essayist ... Which brings us back to that epigraph from Camus. O’Connell admits that he wanted a \'reckoning\' from Macarthur, \'wanted him to be Raskolnikov,\' wanted him to realize, with O’Connell’s patient assistance, what he had done, and why. But there was to be no such reckoning. As O’Connell concedes in this brilliant and rigorously honest book, Macarthur \'had failed me as a character. He had denied me the satisfaction of an ending.\'\
Robert A. Gross
Mixed Book Post Gross has little feel for Emerson and Thoreau as writers, and in searching for their missing careers as activists seems to mistake what the two men were really up to. When Thoreau noted in Walden, \'As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full,\' he didn’t mean that he had opted instead to do bad. He meant that his true business was elsewhere ... Emerson finally wins Gross’s fuller approval around 1844, when, by then firmly established as the leading voice of intellectual renewal in the United States, he takes a public stand against slavery ... My favorite passage of The Transcendentalists and Their World comes at the very end, six hundred pages in, when Gross offers a vigorous reading of the \'Bean Field\' chapter of Walden ... If Gross spent more time in the writings, and less in the public square, we might see an answer to Emerson’s double-edged question, \'Where do we find ourselves?\' in Walden and Emerson’s essays.
Adalbert Stifter
Positive Bookpost This marvelous skein of six thematically linked novellas, in subtle versions that preserve the eccentricity of the originals, feels like an unexpected gift after our collective run of catastrophes ... his stories consistently have the sheer strangeness, and occasional creepiness, that we associate with such near contemporaries as Melville and Hawthorne ... His vividly described disasters—floods, fires, storms, plagues—feel unnervingly of our time, as do the narrative disruptions they carry in their wake ... Stifter’s stories are often about endangered children, perhaps reflecting his own disastrous experience when he and his wife took in her troubled niece ... It is this enigmatic (geheimnisvoll) quality that is the key to Stifter’s strange, disturbing, and wondrous stories.
Francis Spufford
Mixed The New York Times Book Review ... vividly imagined ... A nonfiction writer turned novelist, Spufford is a stickler for carefully researched detail ... Spufford is a fluent writer, bringing a deft touch to the emotional force fields of parents and their children. I think I was as moved as Jo was when she first hears a version of one of her old, abandoned songs remixed, in loops and samples, by her son. But Spufford can also be overly controlling of his characters, mechanically matching them up with nonwhite partners or tethering their fates via unlikely coincidences ... Equally intrusive is Spufford’s distracting practice of lacing his character’s thoughts with literary allusions ... The good are rewarded. The wicked are punished. But the supreme being, doling out just deserts to the five kids rescued from Woolworth’s, is of course Spufford himself. I wish he had cut his richly drawn characters a little more slack.
Laura Thompson
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Laura Thompson...vividly evokes the swarm of brilliant and beautiful sisters, and their lone brother, growing up carefree in a succession of country houses in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire ... The politics of the Mitford sisters followed their romantic attachments, in Thompson’s patronizing view ... A stylish and well-informed writer, Thompson brings a snobbishness of her own to her sympathetic account of Mitford’s life. One’s heart sinks with every mention of \'nowadays,\' a sure signal that a reactionary opinion is about to be aired ... It’s a relief to return to Mitford’s less heavy-handed opinions.
Paul Hendrickson
Mixed Harper\'s A biographer’s instinct, faced with such Sturm und Drang, might be to tone things down a bit, lower the volume, cut through the melodrama in search of the human contours. Well aware of Wright’s reputation for selfishness and megalomania, Hendrickson does note occasional pockets of humanity ... For the most part, however, Hendrickson amplifies the melodrama in the Wright story, and wallows in it ... Hendrickson has written less a conventional biography than a gothic tracery, beholden to Poe and Faulkner and the feverish (and repeatedly invoked) prose of James Agee, stitching together what he calls \'the dreams and furies\' of his subject. Readers interested in a more straightforward treatment might consult Meryle Secrest’s much-admired 1992 biography ... Hendrickson, by contrast, races through the major phases of Wright’s career, dismissing these summarizing sections as mere \'connective tissue,\' and looping back to events he’s previously covered in detail. This distracting approach is unfortunate, since Hendrickson, with no expertise in architecture, is particularly skilled in evoking the feel of a building ... Instead of pursuing the central question—surely the only mystery that really counts—of precisely how Wright, the Midwestern hayseed and congenital liar, achieved such enduring miracles, Hendrickson pursues, at obsessive length, mysteries that seem at best peripheral, and perhaps entirely irrelevant, to what the master accomplished. Thirty overwritten pages are devoted to the background of the man who committed the murders at Taliesin ... Whole sections of Plagued by Fire feel cantilevered, one extreme supposition extending out from another ... Amid all this gothic turmoil, which takes us very far from Wright’s true achievement, one can’t help wondering if there might be a more direct way—more Bach than Wagner—to make some sense of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work.
Monique Truong
Rave The New York Times Truong has wisely resisted two temptations: to write the book in rose-is-a-rose Steinese and to round up the usual Stein entourage of Hemingway, Picasso and company ... The book is about exile: both Binh\'s aching distance from his native Saigon and his two Mesdames\' cheerful distance from America ... Binh\'s Saigon -- Monique Truong\'s birthplace and childhood home -- is evoked here with piercing yearning and authenticity ... Nothing in this distinctive novel feels secondhand. Binh is the key that has unlocked something in Truong, less researched than retrieved ... Plot here is minimal and elusive. The gradual unfolding of secrets -- of sexuality, race and family origin -- is more insistent than any particular conflict ... Against the odds, she has made unsettling art from precisely such exotic cuttings and transplantings.
Peter Martin
Positive The New York Review of Books The story of how so many dictionaries in America came to be known, generically, as Webster’s—a triumph of branding if there ever was one—is among the intriguing lore gathered in Peter Martin’s engaging and informative, if at times a little cluttered, The Dictionary Wars, with forays into copyright law, educational policy, religious revivalism, and other pressures on the verbal life of the nation ... Martin characterizes the Merriam brothers as \'ruthless,\' a word defined in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary (\'since 1828,\' according to the website) as \'having no pity: merciless, cruel.\' That seems a generous assessment of what they did to [lexicographer Joseph] Worcester and other rivals.
Isabella Hammad
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... dazzling ... a deeply imagined historical novel with none of the usual cobwebs of the genre ... an up-close immediacy and stylistic panache ... A less confident writer might have chosen for her hero a man of action ... But Hammad settles instead, like Flaubert, on a conflicted dreamer ... Isabella Hammad has crafted an exquisite novel that, like Midhat himself, delves back into the confusing past while remaining wholly anchored in the precarious present.
David Peace
Positive New York Times Book Review \"Fragmented and adrift is a pretty good description of the structure of Patient X, which consists of 12 loosely connected tales based on Akutagawa’s writings and events from his life. For readers unfamiliar with Akutagawa — who is probably less well known to American readers than such near-contemporaries as Natsume Soseki and Junichiro Tanizaki, both of whom figure in the novel — Peace’s book provides a vivid, if challenging, introduction. Patient X is an uncanny act of ventriloquism, fusing Akutagawa’s jagged storytelling voice with Peace’s own pulsing narration ... Peace’s deft novel leaves us wondering whether Akutagawa was a saint or a madman, a great writer or a bad husband. Or, \'Rashomon\'-like, some combination of this bewildering \'legion of selves.\'”
Ali Smith
Positive The New York Times Sunday Book Review Ali Smith’s sly and shimmering double helix of a novel, How to Be Both, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, opens with a flourish, as a ribbon of words unfurls down the page... Momentarily disoriented (who is speaking so breathlessly, and about what exactly?), the reader is about to be pulled through two quite different stories … If this first section of How to Be Both has some of the cavalier brio of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending Orlando, the second section, prefaced by a schematic image of a security camera, is more like a crime novella unfolding in our modern world of shifting digital identities and N.S.A. surveillance … The two parts of How to Be Both have overlapping themes: the subversive power of art; what Martineau refers to as ‘sexual and gender ambiguities’; the hold of the dead on the living; and, of course, the figure of Francescho him/herself.
Ann Beattie
Positive The New York Times Book Review Her loopy similes can at times be distractingly venturesome...Beattie’s endings can also go astray, entering a pseudopoetic realm of facile epiphany...But they can also seem just right, especially when her aging central characters decide, on a whim, to do something unexpected and life-affirming ... What Beattie’s older characters strive for, in such decisive moments, is to remain open to experience despite their fears. This is one meaning of the line 'The soul should always stand ajar,' in the Emily Dickinson poem from which Beattie draws her title.
Robert Gottlieb
Positive The New York Review of Books Among Gottlieb’s other big successes at Knopf were celebrity memoirs by Lauren Bacall (who wrote her book holed up in a Knopf office), Katharine Graham, and Bill Clinton. He recounts his work with them with zest and telling detail ... His editorial philosophy comes across most clearly in his comments about editing “genre” books—the spy thrillers of John le Carré and Len Deighton, the sci-fi best sellers of Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton—a field in which he has excelled ... Only on rare occasions, as in his account of the difficulties he encountered during the early years of raising a child with Asperger’s syndrome, does he allow himself, briefly, the kind of self-exposure many readers have come to expect from many memoirs; despite his disclaimers, his is a celebrity memoir, though a somewhat veiled one.
Michael Cunningham
Positive The New York Times Book Review For the stories in A Wild Swan, Cunningham has dug out caves of humanity, humor and depth behind some well-known characters.