About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Robert A. Caro
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"Some [of Caro\'s meditations are] drawn from his experiences writing about Robert Moses and Johnson, some freshly minted, some culled from earlier interviews. Inevitably, with selections, there are repetitions and occasional lapses of style: Before we have warmed up, there’s a head-spinning single sentence of almost 170 words. And yet Caro’s squib about working is iridescent, so many brilliant refractions of light from his hard slog of discovering what life has really meant for the people in his narratives, the powerful and the powerless.\
Derek Leebaert
Positive The New York Times Book Review A dense reconstruction of events and leaders from 1945 to 1957 that draws impressively on many original sources ... One might quarrel with the belligerence in the subtitle ... Leebaert’s thesis should send everyone back to the original sources ... Leebaert is no jingoist like the flag-waving Brexiteers ignorant of history as they lead Britain over a cliff ... offers some persuasive bullet points.
Lynne Olson
Positive The New York Times Book Review The claim invites a challenge, but she is persuasive in dramatizing great deeds done and then forgotten or unappreciated ... Olson is sensitive to the traumas of the deposed in having to decide whether to stay as hostages in the hope of sparing their populations the torments of Nazi rule or risk the charge of desertion by fleeing to London ... Olson’s histories have well honored Britain’s heroism. In Last Hope Island she justifies her toast to the exiles and their compatriots.
Rosa Brooks
Positive The New York Times Book Review In impressive and often fascinating detail, she documents that the boundaries between war and peace have grown so hazy as to undermine hard-won ­global gains in human rights and the rule of law ... Brooks writes with clarity and epigrammatic wit, but the random oscillations of her views may annoy some readers. Can’t she make up her mind? Of course, she can. She is not one of those best who lack all conviction. Her honesty in the admission of second and third thoughts is a rebuke to the multitudes who can no longer remember that the Iraq war they denounce is the one they endorsed.