About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Andrew Bacevich
Positive The New York Times Book Review Some of Bacevich’s points are the sharper for being personal ... one can only hope that Bacevich is read and understood by a generation young enough to see through and reject those dismal elites.
Alan Allport
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... unusually informative and stimulating ... They say there’s no disputing taste and, just as I don’t share Allport’s fondness for the Shire, I don’t share his loathing for Chamberlain, who had another side, a deep love of nature ... Quite a few other received ideas are deftly skewered ... valuable.
David Cannadine
Positive The New York Times Book Review Much of the narrative frame concerns high politics, and rightly so. A book like this one is particularly valuable in an age when history undergraduates often startle their teachers by their ignorance of basic facts ... In Cannadine’s lucid account there is the occasional slip (the 1833 Irish Church Temporalities Act suppressed 10 bishoprics, not 18). And there’s one subject that he deals with cursorily at the very end, but that was of the greatest importance in the second part of the century: the growth of organized games. He mentions the publication of Mill’s Utilitarianism in 1863, but not another and surely more important event that year, the meeting at a London pub that drew up a common code for association football. As A. J. P. Taylor said, 'By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished' — words that may be given further force this summer.
Michael Kazin
Mixed The Nation At the outset, Kazin says that he believes the United States should not have taken part in the war [WWI], and his account of the failed but ardent movement that tried to prevent the country from joining it is impressive and moving, although it also presents difficulties: Kazin can more easily admire radical and feminist opponents than someone like Kitchin, a North Carolina Democrat and intransigent segregationist ... As he makes clear, Kazin isn’t writing as an unconditional pacifist, nor does he think that all wars are wrong. Instead, his argument contrasts the 'bad war' the United States entered in 1917 with the 'good war' it entered in 1941 ... There may be lessons in all this, although perhaps not the ones that Kazin thinks ... One may share Kazin’s admiration for the noble spirit of these warriors for peace while reluctantly disagreeing with them.