About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Yuval Noah Harari
Mixed The New York Times Book Review A useful, well-informed primer ... Not all of Nexus feels original. If you pay attention to the news, you will recognize some of the stories Harari tells. But, at its best, his book summarizes the current state of affairs with a memorable clarity ... Frustrating.
Adam Phillips
Positive The Washington Post This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had ... But a book about psychoanalysis is not an analysis. There is no program here, no self-help regimen. These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.
Adam Nicolson
Rave The Washington Post Despite the book’s New Agey title and a halfhearted conclusion, which attempts to reframe the preceding chapters as nuggets of lifestyle advice...in truth Nicolson’s book has little to do with the self-help genre. It is richer and more unusual than that.
Sarah Ogilvie
Rave The New York Times Book Review Ogilvie has provided a sprightly, elegant tribute to the ordinary readers...who made up the bulk of the O.E.D.’s work force, largely unpaid and unsung, filling in millions of slips in their spare time ... An engrossing survey ... The real joy of The Dictionary People is to be reminded that any group of people pinned at its intersection will still burst forth every which way, a tapestry of contradictions, noble and ignoble, wild and banal.
Simon Garfield
Positive The Washington Post Lively and informative ... A chronological history...and Garfield...has a nice conceit whereby the book is arranged into alphabetical chapters.
Ellen Jovin
Pan Washington Post For a book on grammar that runs to 400 pages, actual advice is fairly scanty. Many of Jovin’s 49 chapters squeeze considerable mileage out of relatively minor points: past vs. passed; than vs. then; affect vs. effect...Jovin has written usage manuals, but with its folksy, peripatetic arrangement, \'Rebel With a Clause\' isn’t quite one of them...Strong on charm, then, but without enough of either prescription or reflection, the \'Grammar Table\' finds itself falling between two (grammar) stools.
Toby Faber
Positive The Times Literary Supplement Told almost entirely through extracts from correspondence and memoranda, there is a lot here, and the trade-off is between tone and detail. Building the book out of extended quotation allows us to hear the voices of the key players ... By contrast, however, the firm’s authors occupy an oddly muted role. To leave them out would be perverse, and yet with so many major figures on the Faber list, each is reduced to more or less the same walk-on part: the timid initial approach; the kindly but measured acceptance letter; the gushing response ... The book’s cover features a circle of Fabers’ literary eminences...but the work itself has little to say about them individually. Rather, it is a candid chronicle of the business of getting them, and others, profitably into print in the turbulent seas of twentieth-century publishing.