About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Melinda Gates
Positive The Portland Press Herald [Gates] calls on us to care ... Her book is....a moral appeal, imploring each of us who reads it to look around – at our own families, our own workplaces, our own place in a gigantic, but highly connected, world – and get to work making it more equal.
Dave Cullen
Rave Chicago Tribune \"Cullen traces the movement from the students’ early meetings in their living rooms and first forays onto Twitter. He marks the instant when their Instagram feeds turned from sunsets and selfies to toe-to-toe battles with the National Rifle Association ... Parkland tells their story well and truly. It’s written with the clarity and depth and time — that’s the big thing, time — that the students who died and the students who live deserve, and that the nation grappling with it all needs. I was moved and informed and, most of all, heartbroken by it — even though it’s written with authentic hope.\
Gabrielle Zevin
Rave The Chicago Tribune \"It’s brilliant and hilarious, and it makes you wince in recognition — for the double-standard that relegates scandalized women to a life of shame even as their married lovers continue with their careers (and often their marriages), for the insatiable appetite we have for every last detail, for the ease and speed with which we stop seeing people as multilayered humans ... The five main characters are among my favorite of any recent novel I’ve read. Each is resilient, brave, intelligent, witty and flawed — human, in other words. It’s the sort of book that invites us to examine our long-held beliefs and perceptions. It asks us to imagine, for a moment, another perspective and delivers us the storyline to do so. It hands us characters who are at odds with one another and peels back their layers to reveal the thing they have in common. It has a heart. And a spine. It’s exactly, I would argue, what we need more of right now.\
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Positive The Chicago Tribune The final quarter of What Happened reads like a spy novel. It spells out Clinton’s version of Russia’s involvement in our election and her staff’s attempts to get the media to turn away from her emails long enough to give it some attention ... 'On Being a Woman in Politics' is a fascinating chapter examining the tightrope Clinton has walked during her life in public service ... The folks who are rolling their eyes, hard, at the notion of Hillary Clinton doing all the good she can, for all the people she can, will likely not read What Happened. That’s a shame. It’s a first-person, front-row account of arguably one of the most pivotal elections in American history. But plenty of others will. And I would urge the pundits and the platform-holders to think twice before adding another voice to the 'Go away, Hillary' choir.
Heather Harpham
Rave The Chicago Tribune ...utterly gorgeous ... The story is told in riveting, plot-twisting fashion, and I’m loath to reveal a lot of plot points. But I’ll say that it’s also told with care and courage and humor, and it will deepen your understanding of not just life with a sick child, but life.
Ben Sasse
Positive The Chicago Tribune The thing is, Sasse's book is good. Good enough, in fact, to quiet the part of my mind that doesn't want a lecture from a senator right now. He acknowledges from the beginning that his book could easily be misread as an exercise in cantankerous nostalgia, and he's careful not to let it become one ... I wish he'd countered some of his criticisms of millennials with more acknowledgment of their strengths ... Still, Sasse taps into a sense of unease that a lot of us feel about our kids (and ourselves) as we watch devices suck up increasing amounts of time and energy and our world spiral into a sort of distracted directionlessness. He doesn't pretend to offer a silver bullet, but he offers clear steps for nudging our kids out of their comfort zones and toward curiosity and that elusive compulsion.
Ariel Levy
Rave The Chicago Tribune It's an act of courage to hunt for meaning within grief, particularly if the search upends your life and shakes out the contents for all the world to sift through. Ariel Levy embarks on the hunt beautifully in her new memoir ... The Rules Don't Apply is a search for meaning, not reason. It doesn't seek an explanation (outside of the medical one) for the death of Levy's son, any more than it seeks to explain away the love, fear, frustration and other experiences and emotions that take place within her lifetime. Her grief becomes a new part of her — something to understand and get used to ... She's brave and generous to share her story, which manages to be beautiful, even as it's stark and wrenching.
Amy Schumer
Positive The Chicago Tribune After some initial throat-clearing in the first 30 pages (the book's weakest), Schumer weaves a brave, vulnerable tale without falling into the usual celebrity traps of neediness and defense ... She's also hilarious, which manages to come through on the page.