About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Max Hastings
Positive The Star Tribune A compelling narrative.
S. C. Gwynne
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Too many Civil War books drill so deeply into the conflict that one can lose sight of what it all means. That’s not the case with Gwynne’s lucid and gripping account, in which he strings together a series of vignettes and profiles of wartime figures in novelistic fashion to tell the story of the war’s tumultuous closing months ... Gwynne is especially good at taking a step back from the narrative to flesh out some of the war’s most compelling figures, and not just Lee and Grant. He sketches officers of varying competence.
Rick Atkinson
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune Bringing the Revolutionary War out of the shadows may well require a writer with Atkinson’s superb skills, displayed with such power in his acclaimed World War II trilogy. The war for independence has lost ground in the national imagination to the Civil War, a struggle between brothers memorable for its sheer barbarity, photographic record and issues of equality and states’ rights that still resonate today ... The author uses carefully drawn detail to make riveting a story we think we already know ... two more superb books to anticipate from Atkinson on the long struggle yet to come.
Jill Lepore
Positive Minneapolis Star Tribune \"... absorbing ... At more than 900 pages, this is a big book. But it’s a big subject, and Lepore is as graceful and witty a writer as anyone who has tackled it. Chapter after chapter, she offers new ways to think about familiar topics ... To be sure, the book tilts liberal. But Lepore is nowhere close to being predictable in her judgments.\
Ron Chernow
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...[a] masterful and often poignant biography, a 1,000-page brick of a book that nevertheless moves quickly — much like its subject in war — and persuasively upends the conventional take on Gen. Grant as a butcher on the battlefield and President Grant as a bumbler in the White House ... The Civil War years comprise the best part of Chernow’s book, a familiar tale that nonetheless becomes gripping in his telling ... rarely has a consequential American life played out in such dramatic fashion. Chernow’s gracefully written biography, which promises to be the definitive work on Grant for years to come, is fully equal to the man’s remarkable story.
Ron Hansen
Positive The Minneapolis Star Tribune Hansen's Billy is a shiftless if well-meaning lad who constantly finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, up to the very end of his short life. The book's strengths include a glossary of its many characters, which helps sort Billy's friends from his foes, and Hansen's own vivid and engaging narrative based on his careful reading of the historical record.
Stephen Harrigan
Rave The Minneapolis Star Tribune ...deeply researched and elegantly written ... Although this is a fictional Lincoln, Harrigan’s careful scholarship and graceful prose guarantee insights into the real man that few biographies can deliver.
T.J. Stiles
Rave Minneapolis Star Tribune This is that rare, practically unthinkable Custer book that devotes only about 15 of its 582 pages to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 High Plains clash that cemented Custer’s fame (or infamy) when he led his regiment to their deaths at the hands of a superior force of Lakota and Cheyenne chiefs and warriors. Instead, Stiles focuses on Custer’s huge ambition as the son of an obscure Ohio blacksmith, someone who yearned to be known for more than just military feats.