About Book Marks
L.a. Taggart
Recent Reviews
Lydia Millet
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle In her 15 books, Millet has perfected charged, science-based prose that takes a surgeon’s loupe to how people interact with nature ... Just as Gil is trying to rewrite his destiny, Dinosaurs asks whether we can redirect the climate catastrophe’s plot toward a different ending. In many ways, Millet’s latest novel rings a more hopeful note than her previous work. Let’s take that as a good sign.
Andrea Barrett
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle Though the people in Barrett’s work are fictional, the science is always real. In these six stories, Barrett acts as a kind of storyteller’s ubiquitin, revisiting characters and situations portrayed in her previous nine books but repurposing elements for fresh results ... Each story here offers her signature gifts: lyrical distillation of scientific complexity, artful wonder at the natural world, exquisitely observed details, and prose as precise and inevitable as a mathematical proof. The result, just like the functioning of the cells in your body, is amazing. With Natural History, MacArthur fellow Barrett adds more elements to her masterwork, the cross-referenced periodic table of personalities stretching from today back to the Civil War, all connected by science and ties to a small town by a lake in upstate New York ... With their kaleidoscope interconnectedness, the overlapping circles of Barrett’s stories, from this collection as well as her earlier works, add up to something large and delightful as well.
Doreen Cunningham
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle ... captures rarely observed natural places ... Cunningham braids her personal story, Native Alaskan cultural history, cetacean research and climate reporting for a deep dive into how human actions affect life in the ocean. She portrays a world that is disappearing — melting away, at an increasing rate, or transforming into something less hospitable ... Cunningham explains fluid dynamics, breaking down the difference between laminar flow — the sliding, orderly movement close to a whale’s skin — and the unpredictable, energy-draining turbulence farther away from its streamlined shape, past the \'aquatic cocoon\' of the boundary layer. The reader understands that reporting on climate disaster, and Cunningham’s own troubles, have sent the journalist into uncomfortable turbulence. She finds an easier groove, and readers are richer for it, in the enduring beauty and resilient wonder of the ocean.
Catherine Price
Positive San Francisco Chronicle It doesn’t take a research paper for us to jump aboard the fun train—but Price does ask a critical question. If we’re all in agreement that we really like fun, why do we have so little of it? ... Drawing on research from the field of positive psychology, Price presents lots of hard evidence citing fun’s benefits, noting it improves relationships, happiness, overall health and cognitive function, longevity and confidence. Couldn’t we all use some fun about now? This book feels right for the moment, and its fun-amplification program is the kind of New Year’s resolution a person could really keep. The top-line takeaway is simply to prioritize fun. Let’s go!
Meg Waite Clayton
Rave San Francisco Chronicle ... gripping ... Clayton’s book offers an evocative love story layered with heroism and intrigue—the film Casablanca if Rick had an artsy bent. It’s a vividly rendered, dramatic world, even a bit escapist (as long as notes of rising authoritarianism from the present day don’t ring in your ears). This is another powerful historical novel from Clayton ... an homage to the courage of creative acts, to the refuge of art and its reminder, or insistence, on our shared humanity.
Daisy Hernández
Rave The San Francisco Chronicle With her new book, Hernández — now a journalist and associate professor at Miami University in Ohio — translates for the nation the story of the devastating disease afflicting her aunt and 300,000 other Americans. “The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease” is part memoir, part investigative thriller ... The tragedy Hernández describes is not just the fact of this awful disease that leaves 40-year-olds in end-stage heart failure, but the medical ignorance and systemic racism that add to the damage ... The neglect of immigrants is one of the book’s gravest concerns ... [Hernández\'s] book shines a light on this neglected harm, like the sun forcing kissing bugs into retreat.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Positive The San Francisco Chronicle ... an elegant narrative about the limits—physical and psychological—faced by an Italian woman in midlife ... a headier, more ephemeral book than Lahiri’s earlier ones. The characters are lightly sketched, though her prose shimmers with precise detail. The novel can be read as a character’s crisis of disorientation and loneliness. And it offers a philosophical parable on fears that keep us in the dark. Yet, as always with Lahiri, there’s more to unpack ... Lahiri has demonstrated that she is a master of cultural collisions. Whereabouts returns to her ever-present theme, now in an Italian setting, of the terrors and joys wrought by bridging worlds.