About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won
Mixed Christian Science Monitor While the relationship between the two protagonists is moving, and the novel touches on some important themes regarding language and communication, the drama is pitched at a low level of intensity, and it lacks the appealing strangeness of The Vegetarian. The result is more smoke than fire.
Maylis De Kerangal, trans. Jessica Moore
Rave Christian Science Monitor Brisk and brilliant ... The action takes place almost entirely in the liminal space of the train, while the immense Siberian landscape that passes by the windows... plays an important role in this brief but exhilarating adventure.
Gunnhild Øyehaug, trans. Kari Dickson
Rave Christian Science Monitor In several stories, Øyehaug parts company with established literary conventions ... Adventurous readers with a taste for the absurd will find this collection a delight.
Edward Dolnick
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Dolnick tells the fascinating story of one of the world’s most famous objects and the 20-year odyssey to unravel its mysteries ... Dolnick, a former science writer for The Boston Globe, is the author of numerous books on scientific subjects written for a general audience. His clear and engaging style makes accessible the complex science and art of decoding. He does a masterful job of guiding the reader through the labyrinth of false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends that prefaced a fuller understanding of the symbols ... Along the way, the reader is treated to brief, illuminating excursions into related subjects ... an engrossing account of one of the greatest breakthroughs in archaeological history, one that brought a dead language, and a buried culture, back to life.
Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Although Todrys makes extensive use of sources and documents from both sides of the dispute, there is no doubt that her sympathies lie with the protestors ... Todrys, a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, clearly knows how to gather great quantities of information from a wide variety of sources. She also knows how to tell a good story ... The historical context and ground-level reportage on conditions on both the reservations and the oil fields add greatly to the power of the book. Todrys also does an excellent job of guiding the reader through the thicket of lawsuits, countersuits, court orders, injunctions, amicus briefs, motions for summary judgments, and other legal procedures ... Todrys blends wide-ranging research with solid on-the-ground reporting to tell a compelling and important story—one whose full impact is yet to be felt.
Jan Swafford
Rave The Christian Science Monitor [Swafford] presents not only a lively, accessible, and richly detailed account of his subject’s life and times, but also takes a crack at debunking the \'hoary corpus of myths about Mozart\' ... in addition to prodigious research, he offers up well-informed appraisals and insights into Mozart’s work. He also makes good use of a vast trove of letters written by Mozart, his family members, and many others. Mozart’s letters give the reader a first-hand glimpse at his intelligence, his playful, often bawdy, wit and his caustic scrutiny of people and their many foibles.
Ariel Sabar
Rave The Christian Science Monitor Sabar is an experienced journalist. Here he puts his considerable investigative chops to work and fashions a cautionary tale about experts and expertise that is minutely researched and thoroughly absorbing ... Sabar does an exemplary job of not only digging into every facet, and then some, of the story of Fritz and the long con he pulled on King and Harvard, but in digesting it all and synthesizing it into a comprehensible and exciting narrative. It’s a wild and educational ride. Along the way, readers learn about early Christian history, the vagaries of Copitic script and grammar, the place of papyrus in written communication, methods of dating antiquities, the psychology of the con artist and a great deal more ... Even if the author burrows a bit deep in the weeds in some of his research, the rewards for the reader are still great. In Veritas, Sabar turns a complex, esoteric story into a page turner, and reaffirms the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.