About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Ann Schmiesing
Rave The Wall Street Journal Schmiesing tells the tale behind the tales ... Schmiesing has brought the brothers to life in their fullness.
Craig Brown
Rave The Wall Street Journal Cleverly constructed, consistently insightful and hilarious, and quite possibly the closest we will ever come to understanding who the Sphinx of Balmoral really was.
Yuval Noah Harari
Mixed The Wall Street Journal A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving. Nexus goes down easily, but it isn’t as nourishing as it claims. Much of it leaves a sour taste ... Most interesting, and most flawed, when it examines our current situation.
T D Allman
Positive The Wall Street Journal His perspectives are grand, the history deep, the narrative conversational and enthusiastic ... This rich but tangled origin story comes alive through Allman’s personal exploration of Lauzerte and its environs.
Jason Roberts
Positive The Wall Street Journal A fluent and engaging account of the 18th-century origins of Darwinism before Darwin ... Mr. Roberts’s emphasis on Linnaeus’s and Buffon’s very different personalities sometimes obscures their shared views.
David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Positive The Wall Street Journal As this thoughtful book shows, copyright law has been revised and rewritten according to changing need.
Benjamin Breen
Rave The Wall Street Journal Breen handles his complex and frequently bizarre material with skill and sobriety. He marshals a convincing mass of circumstantial evidence as well as documentary fragments that survived the destruction of MK-Ultra records.
Christopher de Hamel
Rave The Wall Street Journal He traces the four-century age of the medieval manuscript and its longer afterlife through the lives of its makers and collectors. Exceptional in expertise, graceful in style and illustrated as vividly as its subject, this book is a masterpiece.
Robert Darnton
Rave The Wall Street Journal Darnton is one of the foremost Anglophone interpreters of French culture in the decades before 1789. In The Revolutionary Temper, he searches for that most elusive of historical subjects, a state of mind. Drawing on an ingenious array of archival materials to create a sequence of tableaux, he traces the emergence of a popular mentality ... Darnton maps the irreversible alterations of the public mood.
Simon Schama
Rave The Wall Street Journal The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.
Neil Howe
Positive The Wall Street Journal Detect[s] deep cyclical patterns in the quotidian fluctuations of our experience ... Big history and bold futurology, and the closer it is to the present, the more reasonable it seems.
Tara Isabella Burton
Rave The Wall Street Journal Ms. Burton is right and brave to surmise that hollow self-making offers the wrong kind of answers to the modern bourgeois or digital peasant who wants to live a happy or meaningful life. If the n-word, narcissism, appears only fleetingly in Self-Made, it is because it is now everywhere.
Peter Brown
Rave The Wall Street Journal A scintillating intellectual autobiography and an evocative traversal of lost worlds ... Mr. Brown’s account in this volume resembles a detective novel, with historians as disputatious witnesses ... He gave us a new vision of an old world.
Mike Jay
Mixed The Wall Street Journal Psychonauts largely ignores the mass stupefaction of the present ... Instead, Mr. Jay compounds five grains of Victorian nostalgia with one grain of psychedelic futurism ... Mr. Jay makes the libertarian case for blowing your mind.
Kristen R Ghodsee
Mixed The Wall Street Journal Could have made the case for everyday, incremental improvements, perhaps with a number-crunching argument for Scandinavian-style social democracy. Such a book would have been as rich in data as it would be dull in prescription. Instead, Ms. Ghodsee goes for utopia ... Makes the book a fascinating read, though not in the ways the author intends ... Her book is a reminder why intellectuals should never be placed in positions of authority.
S C Gwynne
Positive The Wall Street Journal A Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings. Mr. Gwynne, a journalist and historian, sets the R101’s human and mechanical drama against a flammable backdrop: the longer and similarly disastrous arc of the airship as an alternative to the airplane.
Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel
Rave The Wall Street Journal A remarkable moral drama, a miniature epic that is subtle in characterization, gripping in detail, and shocking in its brutal ordinariness.
Sarah Bakewell
Rave The Wall Street Journal A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading, whether you agree with it or not ... Ms. Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.
Reid Mitenbuler
Positive The Wall Street Journal Detailed, digressive and frequently fascinating ... Mr. Mitenbuler emphasizes that Freuchen was as palatable to current sensitivities as any old-school explorer could be. Still, he frequently criticizes his subject, Danish officialdom and the past in general for not attaining our current heights of enlightenment. It is hard not to suspect that Mr. Mitenbuler set out on his epic biographical journey with a sensitivity reader at his shoulder. These censorious interruptions are the literary equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.
John Higgs
Positive The Wall Street Journal John Higgs offers a rambling and often brilliant meander through the British male psyche ... In pairing these pop-cultural phenomena, Mr. Higgs... is onto something. It is unfortunate that his ingenuities do not extend to musical analysis ... All things must pass, but Bond cannot die and the Beatles’ music still plays. Both franchises will pump out the product for eternity. This book is an excellent and oddly illuminating way to pass the time between installments.
Jamie Kreiner
Positive The Wall Street Journal The Wandering Mind is a lucid and vivid examination of how early Christian monks created habits of contemplation ... Ms. Kreiner, a professor of medieval history at the University of Georgia, also shares intriguing perspectives on our own values and priorities ... The Wandering Mind focuses on more than the past, and its implications demand our attention.
Charles Spicer
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Spicer suggests that his new view of the AGF raises \'the fundamental question\' of whether there were \'alternatives to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany other than total war.\' Probably not, in hindsight. Still, like the recent rehabilitations of Neville Chamberlain and his ministers, Coffee With Hitler illuminates the dilemmas of appeasement on the terms of the 1930s. We prefer to forget that the British acclaimed Chamberlain as a peacemaker when he returned from Munich in September 1938. As in an Alan Furst novel, no one knew for certain what would happen next.
Karen Armstrong
Pan The Wall Street Journal This is Romantic talk. Like the Romantics, Ms. Armstrong hears a secret harmony in the dream of eternal Asia. Nature remains sacred in Islam, Hinduism, Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism ... Ms. Armstrong misunderstands her scientific villains ... There are many more historically dubious leaps of faith ... Ms. Armstrong’s hope to excavate a single idea of the sacred at the root of human society is a Romantic notion, a product of the modern split between Man and Nature and an attempt to fill the gap left by the decline of Christianity in Europe ... The author retraces the Romantic agony of the spirit into a familiar, ahistoric and unsavory dead-end: eternal Aryan virtues versus the eternal Jewish problem. The Romantic effort to fill a spiritual vacuum by the cults of myth helped produce the catastrophic politics of the 20th century ... The makers of religion can stretch the bounds of credulity in the name of a higher purpose. Historians have no excuses.
Keiron Pim
Rave The Wall Street Journal A claustrophobic epic, a portrait of the artist as a portrait of his age ... A remarkable work of detection and empathy. Mr. Pim captures Roth’s perpetual motion, his nostalgia and premonitions, his wrestling with the currents of a disastrous age.
Alan Rickman
Pan The Wall Street Journal Many diary entries feel like notes for a future autobiography, though it is not clear that the author would have wanted them published in this raw form ... We are left with inklings of a tell-all: some tidbits about the author, many about a business where an insufficiency of the inner life is a job qualification. The diaries of a writer or a composer might deepen our understanding of their work. But actors are better students of strangers’ characters than their own. What we want is gossip. Tragically, Rickman is bound by the Code of the Luvvies and a seriously restricted set of adjectives ... This volume’s entries may be brief, but their solipsism is epic. Rickman visits bookshops but never tells us what he buys ... comes with a truly, madly gushing foreword from another shameless luvvie, Emma Thompson...But the impression from these diaries is that Rickman was, like his cartoonish later roles, a lonely misanthrope, and embittered by his journey up the \'cul-de-sac of stardom\' to a villa in Tuscany.
Andrew Lownie
Positive Wall Street Journal Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King begins on Dec. 11, 1936, with the last act of Edward’s 326-day reign...As he read his abdication speech into a BBC microphone at Windsor Castle, Wallis listened in the South of France, muttering \'the fool, the stupid fool\'...Throwing over a kingship was only the beginning of his folly...Edward and Wallis soon had a new shared goal: To undo his error and her humiliation by returning to Britain, ideally as king and queen (and definitely without paying income tax)...The closest they came was in the summer of 1940...France had fallen, and Edward and Wallis were dawdling in neutral Portugal in the company of Nazi agents...Did Edward, as Mr. Lownie claims, commit treason?...The \'conventional line,\' Mr. Lownie writes, is that Edward’s attitude to Nazi Germany differed little from that of his family, much of Britain’s aristocracy, and most of its Conservative government...In the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis continued to socialize with pro-Nazi figures, including the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren, who, like Santo, was involved in moving German money into South America...But their last chance had passed...The rest of their story, and the rest of Mr. Lownie’s narrative, descends into freeloading, snobbery and irrelevance...They never paid for anything, treachery included.
Dominic Lieven
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... an instructive epic, deficient only in that the author does not pursue his subject to the present day ... Mr. Lieven’s emphasis on non-European empires is refreshing, but his story peters out, rather like the British Empire. It would have been instructive if he had pursued his theme, rather than grumbled about Donald Trump’s putative similarity to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Richard Cohen
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... a substantial, ambitious and consistently readable inquiry into the history of history ... Mr. Cohen gives a Thucydidean survey of each historian’s aims and achievements, but with plenty of Herodotean detail too.
Robert D. Kaplan
Rave Wall Street Journal [An] elegantly layered exploration of Europe’s past and future ... Adriatic mimics the layered complexity of its subject. This is a multifaceted masterpiece, a glittering excavation of the glories and rubbish heaps of Europe’s past, a meditation on history and the inner journey of traveling with books in mind, a traveler’s elegy for paths taken and not taken, and a conditionally hopeful reflection on Europe’s emerging future.
Alex Danchev
Rave Wall Street Journal [A] thoroughly and gruesomely entertaining biography ... Alex Danchev died before he could write his final chapter. His manuscript was ably finished by Elizabeth Whitfield. All this befits their subject. This is a fascinating biography of an artist by Alex Danchev, this is not by Alex Danchev; this is fascinating as biography, but not because of the art.
Hugo Vickers
Positive The Wall Street Journal A time capsule from the last days of a posh and largely gay Ruritania, and a primer on the interwar glory days of English modernism, the book is a self-knowing account of Mr. Vickers’s ascent from outsider to insider ... Names are dropped as carefully as cigarette ash: Diana Vreeland, Princess Grace, Truman Capote, Audrey Hepburn. But it’s the supporting cast that really creates this madcap social history. As Simon Heffer did with his annotations to the diaries of the Anglo-American sybarite and politician Chips Channon, Mr. Vickers supplies another pleasure of a lost age, the footnote ... When Mr. Vickers has his eye to the keyhole, we see a secret panorama.
David Hockney and Martin Gayford
Rave The Wall Street Journal Spring Cannot be Cancelled is Mr. Gayford’s warm, intelligent and quietly inspiring report on what Mr. Hockney has been up to. It’s also a memoir of love in the time of Covid: of friendship and a shared passion for art ... Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is full of such insights, and all the more enjoyable for being related in the tone of two friends enjoying a long-distance glass of wine. The dialogue, apparently simple but actually highly sophisticated, could not have occurred between any other friends.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan might, like Bacon’s friends, share a tendency to confuse the man with the art—like Oscar Wilde, Bacon was his own best work—but they bring a sober eye and an organizing mind to Bacon’s \'gilded gutter life.\' As in their acclaimed \'de Kooning,\' the authors frame their subject and his work as a portrait of the age ... The authors excel at illustrating his formation—Bacon destroyed almost all his early work—his manipulation of his image and value, and his helpless gambling in the power games of love. He believed in beauty and tragedy, and he got and gave both. His long romances with violent lovers like Peter Lacy, the alcoholic ex-RAF pilot who beat him savagely, and George Dyer, the petty thief who died by suicide in a hotel bathroom in 1971 on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais, were tormented and cruel ... But this was who Bacon was, and who he was determined to be ... The paintings that emerged from the suffering and destruction are the spiritual testament of a Wilde man in an age when hope in humanity had been exposed as a cruel and gory joke. Bacon had the Regency gentleman’s contempt for public opinion, but his figures are alone and abused, shamed and exposed, their faces broken by the slash of the brush. The hand that held it was tremulous with fear, desire and drink, and that was his signature. His talent was protean. Had he been trained, he would have been a better draftsman, with the technical skill to integrate his figures and their backgrounds. But he would have been a worse painter.
Toby Wilkinson
Positive The Wall Street Journal [A] dramatic, detailed and eccentric-packed story of the century between the decoding of the Rosetta Stone in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 ... as Toby Wilkinson shows, the discovery of lost monuments, grave goods and mummified corpses also stimulated the emergence of their true inheritors, the modern Egyptian nation.
Craig Brown
Rave The Literary Review (UK) One Two Three Four begins and ends with Paul McCartney counting in the band on stage at the Cavern Club in 1961. In between is a brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame ... All the episodes of the sacred biography are here, and most are devastated by Brown’s expert shuffling of perspectives ... The exceptional strangeness of The Beatles reflects the ordinary oddity of real life. One Two Three Four, by putting The Beatles in their place as well as their time, is by far the best book anyone has written about them and the closest we can get to the truth.
Viv Groskop
Rave The Wall Street Journal ... witty and informative ... When Ms. Groskop wrote a weekly commentary for the Guardian on the Poldark television series, her columns were more entertaining than their subject. Here, too, she steals the show from her ostensible subject, using ironic autobiography and solid scholarship to guide us into the steamy territory of modern French letters ... a vividly personal Gallic gallimaufry ... The richness of French literature means that some heavy hitters are missing. It might be unfortunate that we meet Gustave Flaubert but not Jules Verne, and Victor Hugo but not Émile Zola ... Ms. Groskop always goes for the joke, but Au Revoir, Tristesse abounds in fascinating details that reflect deep learning and real enthusiasm ... Ms. Groskop is a skilled raconteuse who brings people—and the page—to life. She writes with a self-deprecating appreciation of the Frenchman or -woman manqué(e) that lurks in us all. You don’t have to be a savant to enjoy this book, though a little schoolroom French will go a long way. And Au Revoir, Tristesse will make a witty, seductive companion should you find yourself unaccountably alone between 4 and 6 in the afternoon.
Roberto Calasso, Trans. By Richard Dixon
Positive The Spectator Calasso is elliptical, allusive and dazzlingly eclectic. We might expect to encounter Darwin, dispensing the final cut to the animal past as human history, but not Beatrix Potter, for the further powerplay of swathing the animals in human garb and sentiment. Like Marsilio Ficino’s 15th-century attempt to revive Plato’s academy at Florence, The Celestial Hunter is ‘an initiation through the book’, speculative but capable of changing how you see things.
Blake Gopnik
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... detailed, enthusiastic and absorbing ... Mr. Gopnik expertly traces Warhol’s technical and intellectual roots to his studies in painting and illustration at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology ... laudable if not impressive detail.
Norman Lebrecht
Rave The Wall Street Journal ... thrilling and tragic ... Mr. Lebrecht expertly explores the Jewishness of Marx and Mendelssohn ... Unlike many popular historians, Mr. Lebrecht gives equal space to Jewish counter-movements, with accessible accounts of the splitting of Ashkenazi Judaism and of the birth of Zionism ... Mr. Lebrecht is especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past ... Mr. Lebrecht writes in the present continuous tense, placing readers in a dynamic drama and emphasizing that the future was always unwritten ... Mr. Lebrecht has written a lament for a lost world and a celebration of human endurance and the religious imagination.
William Feaver
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... gossipy, enthralling and sometimes appalling ... Along with all sorts of biographical detail, this book captures the age in which Freud lived during the first half of his long life, perhaps so well that the broader cultural portrait comes close to eclipsing its principal subject. Still, he is never far from view ... Though Mr. Feaver’s chronicle drops more names than a misplaced phone book, Freud’s nasty charm is addictive and irresistible ... One could say that The Restless Years, with its vivid anecdotes and rakish candor, is a kind of collaboration between Freud and Mr. Feaver—an amalgam of two kinds of 20th-century confessional: the diaries of European disintegration, like those of Count Harry Kessler or Victor Klemperer ; and the very English social diaries of Chips Channon or Alan Clarke. This was the double nature of Freud’s life.
Will Birch
Rave The Wall Street Journal ... entertaining ... Like Mr. Lowe, Will Birch is a pub-rock veteran and ex-producer. He is casually expert in the way of those rare music writers who can both play music and write, and his account of life on the road is brutally and comically frank. He likes his subject as a friend, but then, it’s hard not to like a legend who, hearing he’s been offered a spot at a jazz festival in west London, says, \'Lovely . . . I can get there on the bus.\'
Roberto Calasso, Trans. by Richard Dixon
Positive The Wall Street Journal Like its predecessors, The Unnamable Present...is aphoristic in exposition, allusive in interpretation and uncompromising in erudition ... Mr. Calasso is not a lecturer or a literalist. He does not write straightforwardly, but shuffles between ideas and episodes, treating all thought as contemporaneous. He handles the events of the past with the reverence of a priest, rather than the dispassion of a historian. Material facts are the tangible aspect of hidden truths ... In Mr. Calasso’s cosmology of ritual and repetition, even those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Ernst Jünger, Trans. by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen
Rave The Wall Street Journal Jünger’s war diaries, translated here with damning clarity by Thomas and Abby Hansen, are a fascinating, refined and disturbing record of the moral disasters of Nazism and collaboration ... Jünger’s aesthetic sensibility is so refined that he seems insensate to his surroundings ... A diary is always written to be read. Jünger, conscious of his fame and position, wrote with posterity in mind. A fellow-traveler on the road to murder, he describes the microcosm of collaboration, but casts a pall of mystical speculation over the chains of command and guilt.
Thomas Brothers
Rave The Wall Street Journal Help!, by the Duke University musicologist Thomas Brothers, is a historically masterly and musically literate unraveling of some of the most-admired credits in 20th-century popular music: the compositions of Duke Ellington and the Beatles.
Tim Mohr
Positive The Wall Street Journal \"As Tim Mohr’s original and inspiring Burning Down the Haus shows, music could make all the difference in the world ... Yet Burning Down the Haus is more than an exciting yarn. Mr. Mohr has written an important work of Cold War cultural history, and his first-hand interviews are invaluable evidence.\
Martin Gayford
Rave The Wall Street Journal As he traces London’s art scene from the 1940s to the 1970s, the configuration of friends and rivals he presents is as lucid as a family tree. Filled with vivid anecdotes that might have otherwise disappeared into the Soho air, Modernists & Mavericks is Mr. Gayford’s masterpiece, and a major work of modern art history ... Mr. Gayford identifies a common thread of \'idiosyncratic accommodations\'—to the history of art, to photography, to war and its aftermath, to Romantic Paris and the romance of postwar London. He also detects a common pursuit of what Freud called \'art that is in some way concerned with truth\'—an effort to produce painting that, in Mr. Gayford’s words, \'felt like reality without imitating it.\'
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Rave The Wall Street Journal Unmasked is Mr. Lloyd Webber’s charmingly idiosyncratic, surprisingly endearing and ruthlessly entertaining autobiography. It is customary to compare great musical autobiographies to the Memoirs of Berlioz, but Unmasked is much more fun ... Like the author’s music, his memoir is irresistible. Mr. Lloyd Webber sounds like himself on the page; this, like writing show tunes, is more difficult than it may appear. His love for the business is infectious, and his anecdotage polished ... The critics call Mr. Lloyd Webber a ham, and it clearly hurts. But the critics, Richard Rodgers once told him, are 'afraid of sentiment,' and are often musically illiterate. This is musical theater, after all.
Anthony DeCurtis
Rave The Wall Street Journal What were the sources of Reed’s rage, and the obnoxiousness that led the Swedish actor Erland Josephson to believe that he had just met someone called Lee Rude? Like most rock biographies, Anthony DeCurtis’s Lou Reed: A Life spins Freud’s early hits. But, then, rock was the sound of revolt in the days when the family was still nuclear, and Reed did write Oedipal numbers like ‘Kill Your Sons’ … A Life is comprehensive and sympathetic, if too generous in its patience with Reed’s sadism, rudeness, vanity and patchy solo albums. For Mr. DeCurtis, Reed’s biographical Rosebud was homosexual shame deriving from his upbringing. In the end, he didn’t want to be the first gay rock star.
Anthony Doerr
Pan The New Republic A novel is not a historical document, but it does become one, regardless of its author’s preference. Our entertainments reflect their times: how we choose to remember historical events, and how we prefer to remember them. Especially when the worst of times, World War II, becomes material for the lightest of entertainments … Doerr's novel is an unsavory mixture of ‘relativizing’ and ‘aestheticizing’ … Doerr's writing is pompous, pretentious, and imprecise. Every noun is escorted by an adjective of reliable but uninspiring quality. Eyes are ‘wounded.’ Brown hair is ‘mousy’ … When World War II is reduced to a conflict between technological determinism and innocent children, the difference between aggressors and defenders is erased. We see no evil, only ‘normalized’ reflections in the Sea of Flames.
Alex Beam
Positive The Wall Street Journal ...[an] elegant and intimate account of the rise and fall of the Wilson-Nabokov friendship.