About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
James R. Hansen
Rave The New York Times Book Review What happened on their journeys... makes for reading both enthralling and horrifying ... [Hansen] shows... impressive research, fine storytelling skills and mastery of detail. I was particularly grateful for his avoidance of the pop psychologizing that is sometimes found in chronicles of extreme human achievement.
Lawrence Wright
Positive The New York Times Book Review What makes Lawrence Wright’s “The End of October” exceptional is the same quality that elevated Defoe’s work: deep, thorough research ... [Wright] applies the magisterial force of his reporting skills into spinning a novel of pestilence, war and social collapse that, given the current pandemic, cuts exceedingly close to the bone ... His understanding of world affairs, Middle East gossip, politics and governmental ineptitude is exceptional ... Despite the nonfiction scaffolding, this is a novel, and a good one ... Wright does not spare the reader. There are vivid and ghastly descriptions of hemorrhagic shock, social disorder and brutality.
David Koepp
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... Koepp has paged through the catalog of dark biology and found something truly delicious: a genus of parasitic fungi that makes Ebola look like the sniffles ... This is a classic thriller in the tradition of Crichton and Richard Preston ... if you relish, as I do, horrendous and revolting descriptions of distended bodies writhing and heaving and ribcages bursting open with the sound of snapping sticks and guts flying into the faces of dumbfounded people, and if you like the image of unwholesome green globules of fungus bubbling along the ground toward a paralyzed scientist, then this is the thriller for you. But Koepp is better than Crichton in three significant ways: He writes well, he has a wicked sense of humor and his characters are so keenly, intelligently and even movingly drawn that they might have stepped out of a literary novel. On every level, Cold Storage is pure, unadulterated entertainment.
Rachel Slade
Positive The New York Times Slade did not have to resort to reasonable inference and guesswork about the vessel’s final moments. She was able to quote the actual words spoken on the bridge. The mundane remarks about the fetching of coffee, the complaints about the company, the jokes, the giving and taking of routine orders and the wistful asides about home, children and spouses left behind — these details paint a poignant and tragic picture of ordinary people heading to their deaths ... The book tells of the heroic search-and-rescue operations, the hunt for the black box, the investigations and hearings and the nature of hurricanes. It chronicles the despicable reactions of Tote and its upper management to the tragedy. The pusillanimous, corporate-speak testimony of several corporate executives is quoted at length — perhaps at too great a length. But one can’t help reading it, page after page, in disbelief and disgust.
Michael Wallis
Rave The New York Times Book Review Wallis has delved into an extraordinary mass of original material, documents, diaries, accounts and letters, as well as new sources apparently not available to previous authors, and produced not only a definitive account of the Donner tragedy, but also a book so gripping it can scarcely be put down ... With a keen eye for the particulars, Wallis has done a superb job sifting through lurid tabloid moralizing and unreliable accounts to explore the complex truths of human beings pushed to the absolute limits of existence.