About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Max Boot
Rave The Washington Post Magisterial ... Perhaps without consciously intending to, Boot has written the first important Reagan biography of the post-Reagan era ... Boot provides fascinating vignettes of Reagan’s upbringing and entertainment career ... Vivid ... [A] splendid biography.
Mike Pence
Mixed The Washington Post Almost nowhere else in this book does Pence acknowledge that his running mate lost the election fair and square, and that Biden is his legitimate successor. It’s a significant minimization ... Pence doesn’t convey the full horror of the Capitol invasion, but he writes compellingly of his outrage at how the mob \'desecrated the seat of our democracy\' ... The blunt facts of his bravery in remaining at the Capitol and his insistence that Congress reconvene that very evening to complete its work speak for themselves. It’s unclear if Pence intends this memoir as a calling card for some future campaign, but his honorable conduct during a dark and dangerous day for the nation makes for more compelling stump-speech material than most politicians can muster ... Aside from its one remarkable event, and its close-up descriptions of a unique figure in the history of the American presidency, Pence’s memoir resembles those of other politicians ... It is unreliable as history, particularly in its claims for the successes of the administration’s handling of covid-19, where Pence skips over the myriad ways that Trump made the pandemic deadlier by politicizing public health. More generally, Pence portrays the decidedly mixed record of the administration as a nearly unbroken series of political wins, promises made and kept ... Pence’s descriptions of his interactions with Trump are among the most interesting parts of the book, although here too objectivity is not the author’s strong suit ... The tone of Pence’s memoir darkens in its final chapters ... Aside from a small number of passing moments, his memoir also fails to unequivocally deny Trump’s falsehoods. Instead, Pence resorts to weasel-worded half-admissions.
George F Will
Positive Washington Post Haven’t we heard enough from [Will] by now? Shouldn’t the octogenarian hang up his quill and ink blotter? ... The nearly 200 columns collected here confirm that Will is still a brilliant prose craftsman as well as a keen and dyspeptic political observer. Love him or loathe him, there is no one else like him ... He channels the sinewy, provocative and feline style of his journalistic model Murray Kempton, the buoyant cosmopolitan conservatism of his mentor William F. Buckley and the world-weary, scholarly wisdom of his political beau ideal Daniel Patrick Moynihan. An artisan of the aphorism as well as a luminous book reviewer and obituarist, he is a considerably more complicated thinker than the tweedy, bow-tied conservative persona he tends to project on TV ... Much of the book is given over to his denunciations of the ideas, language and scholarship of left-wing academics ... Will can’t be accused of overlooking the darker aspects of America’s history ... But his optimism elides into Panglossianism with his applause for Justice Clarence Thomas’s 2009 call to gut the Voting Rights Act ... There is simply no way to reconcile Will’s praise for the Voting Rights Act as marking the true end of slavery with the Republican Party’s ongoing suppression of minority votes.
Mark Salter
Rave The Washington Post There was no one like John McCain. But readers may come away from Mark Salter’s outstanding and frequently moving biography of the late Republican senator wondering if the absence of anyone remotely like McCain from our current politics says more about him or us ... Other McCain biographies have offered more detailed histories of his early upbringing as the son and grandson of legendary Navy admirals, his headstrong youth and training at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, his combat service in the Vietnam War, and his five years of imprisonment and torture in Hanoi. The advantage of Salter’s account, The Luckiest Man, is that he was able, as McCain’s aide and confidant, to ask the senator over years of close observation about how these experiences shaped his character, outlook and politics ... Salter’s psychological portrait of McCain is informed and convincing.
Jacob S. Hacker
Positive The Washington Post The authors have a knack for synthesizing complicated academic studies and explaining them concisely for popular audiences. They make particularly good use of political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s work on the historical role played by European conservative parties in nascent democracies ... The authors’ analysis doesn’t adequately account for phenomena such as compassionate conservatism, intraparty fights over issues such as reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank or policy proposals such as a border adjustment tax that pitted large corporate interests against one another. Nonetheless, Hacker and Pierson accurately describe an overarching pattern of the super-rich using the Republican Party to tilt the American economy and political life in their favor ... Those who would resist this development should carefully consider the analysis that Hacker and Pierson lay out in such convincing and depressing detail.
Julian E Zelizer
Positive The New York Times Book Review Although Burning Down the House is not the first history to cast Gingrich as lead assassin in the murder of bipartisanship and effective governance, it is an insightful if deeply unflattering portrait of Gingrich himself, highlighting his signature traits of arrogance, ferocity, amorality and shoulder-shrugging indifference to truth. It’s not surprising that Gingrich declined the author’s interview request. And the book’s narrow time frame, which stops well short of Gingrich’s leading the House Republicans to their 1994 electoral triumph and his subsequent elevation as speaker, supplies a detailed and nuanced historical context that makes Gingrich’s actions more understandable if not excusable ... Zelizer provides a moving description of Wright’s farewell address, in which the resigning speaker decried the \'mindless cannibalism\' that had overtaken politics, and he delivers an eloquent indictment of all those responsible for Wright’s downfall.