About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Sebastian Junger
Rave The Observer (UK) This is a moving, compact, philosophically ambitious, theological and scientific meditation of raw honesty and a necessary endeavour at a time when atheist materialism verges on hegemony among intellectuals in western society.
Oscar Martinez, trans. by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John B. Washington
Rave The Guardian (UK) ...a gale-force book, a sweep across the equally daunting criminal and physical landscapes from the vantage point of those at the war\'s coalface ... But no one has yet traced the survivors of such massacres; no one has travelled with them into Mexico from the barrios of El Salvador, jumping trains collectively known as \'the Beast\', at times flagged down or ambushed by the most vicious cartel, Los Zetas ... Martínez did these things, to learn the risks and rules first hand ... Martínez is clearly a wonderful listener – journalism\'s rarest and most important attribute – and this makes his prose resound with raw authenticity ... As important as Martínez\'s testimony is his devictimisation of these people.
Lindsey Hilsum
Positive The New York Review of Books Journalists will devour Hilsum’s book, but will others? They should: with Marie’s story, Hilsum opens doors through which many would not otherwise peep. But the book also revels in \'the Yale celebrity set Marie moved in\' and soirées in London lambent with \'aristocrats, artists, filmmakers, politicians, poets.\' People tend to distrust reporters, and Marie’s social whirl might give the wrong impression, suggesting that we inhabit high society and are devoid of friends who earn bad pay for jobs they dislike ... Something within herself had to be defeated, as Hilsum’s subtle portrait makes clear. No need to pretend it was all virtue and \'bearing witness\': \'take it to the limit\' was Marie’s nature, and it worked, until it didn’t.
Francisco Cantú
Rave The New York Review of Books Reading Cantú’s account reminded me of the scathing words I heard from the tribal activist Mike Flores, with whom, one suspects, Cantú’s mother might sympathize ... \'They act the tough guy, but if you put any of ’em out on the land under the sun without their toys, they’d be dead in two days\' ... Cantú is part of this, but apart from it. He is from the \'broken earth,\' not Texas or South Carolina; he is educated; there is a heavy-hearted softness in his dealings with those he arrests and whose language he speaks ... Cantú’s account is a refreshing counterpoint to the glut of narco-thrillers and action-movie fantasies about US agents taking out drug dealers in Mexico. His disillusion with the agency he joined is total, his dismay at the system of border control is sincerely felt, and his book is a valuable contribution to the literature on what has become an increasingly scalding issue in the Trump presidency. Cantú’s story has deep roots too in American and Mexican history: death, detention, and deportation on the border.
Emma Reyes, trans. Daniel Alarcón
Rave The Guardian ...described with such quirky grace and raw honesty, such a childlike eye for detail and disarming explanation of the inexplicable, that it is as poetic as it is horrific ... Aged 19, Emma connects with 'the world' beyond the locks by meeting the eye of a milkman through a hole he has made in the convent wall, wherein, characteristically, she beholds laughter. Now she must regain that world whence she came, and does so by stealing the key while its keeper prays – an act of freedom both intimate and epic, like the book itself.
David Grann
Rave The Guardian ...here lies the macabre intimacy that marks this out from other stories of mass killing of American Indians: inheritance, of course, entailed marrying Native women, raising children with them while knowing the plan’s murderous outcome ... Though Grann does not write like a Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry, one can forget sometimes that this is historical investigation, and not fiction in their vein. Then turn the page, and there are photographs of the characters about whom we are reading, from the archive, in real life ... a timely and disturbing chapter in the original, terrible atrocity.