About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
James Holland
Positive The Wall Street Journal Focused mostly on the fighting in the region surrounding the abbey at Monte Cassino from January to May 1944.
Eric Blehm
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Blehm’s description of Kelly’s meticulous training under Mr. Beglinger, and his minute-by-minute account of the fateful day leading up to Kelly’s demise, make this book as riveting as any thriller.
Bryan Appleyard
Positive The Wall Street Journal The bulk of the book focuses on these grand themes of change, speckled with pithy tidbits of automotive and engineering history ... Mr. Appleyard does a good job chronicling the 1950s and ’60s heyday of American car culture ... Even if we’re browbeaten into a technology fraught with questions, Mr. Appleyard recognizes that it’ll fall short of the broad and universal impact cars had on society in the early 20th century.
John Bainbridge
Positive The Wall Street Journal One aspect of this well-told chronicle that may surprise present-day readers is that in the 1850s and ’60s guns and their evolutionary developments were regularly trumpeted in the mainstream media ... As Gun Barons makes clear, guns, over their long history, have been more an instrument for good than evil.
Nathan Gorenstein
Positive The Wall Street Journal As the woke mob continues to rifle through the history books looking for icons to topple, it’s almost certain they will eventually get to firearms inventor John Browning. Thanks to a well-researched and very readable new biography, The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World, he’ll likely come into their crosshairs sooner rather than later.
Kevin Maurer
Rave The Wall Street Journal ... excellent and detailed account of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s daring airborne assault and conquest of Corregidor ... To piece together the details of the intense fighting that followed, Mr. Maurer leans on the memoirs of three veterans of the 503rd ... Thanks to Mr. Maurer, the stories of McCarter, Calhoun, Bradford, Lopez and countless others from the 503rd will forever be remembered in this well-told and riveting history.
Neal Bascomb
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... well-researched ... starts off slowly, maybe wandering a bit too far afield with its many diversions into early-20th-century European-motorsport history. Which is too bad, if it means turning away readers who aren’t already racing enthusiasts from this otherwise excellent account. Once the author gets in gear, however, he moves with the aplomb of an F1 driver who starts in the middle of the pack and works his way up, car by car, to take the lead ... exciting, fast-moving prose.
Colin O'Brady
Rave The Wall Street Journal On its face, the book is an incredibly engaging and well-written account of one man’s quest to cross the world’s harshest and most barren continent unassisted. That means no motorized sled, no food drops; just Mr. O’Brady, slogging 900 miles on skis with a 375-pound sled in tow, dragging everything he needs to survive for nearly two months across a vast, frozen expanse that doesn’t change much from day to day except for the degree to which he has to contend with wind and snow ... Thankfully, the book is much more than that. In addition to chronicling the physical challenges of staying alive in such inhospitable terrain, Mr. O’Brady weaves in biographical details that make you care as much about the man as the mission. But where the author excels is in detailing the mental challenges of such an expedition in a way that makes his struggles and the lessons he learns relatable to the average person.
Christopher Edmonds
Positive The Wall Street Journal World War II has been covered so extensively that there’s little left to add to the broader narrative. What remains are many personal stories that give us a deeper understanding of the men who did the grunt work to defeat the Axis Powers. The best to come out recently is No Surrender ... a very moving story.
James Carl Nelson
Rave The Wall Street Journal James Carl Nelson...deserves an A for his excellent book ... Mr. Nelson paints distinguishing portraits of [the soldiers] ... Mr. Nelson describes myriad hit-and-run skirmishes between the Allies and the Bolsheviks, countless brutal engagements in weather cold enough to freeze machine guns and men ... Mr. Nelson does not mince words.
Hampton Sides
Rave Wall Street Journal \".. we can now add Hampton Sides’s On Desperate Ground [to the pantheon of literature on The Battle of Chosin Reservoir], which hits all the right notes in the novelistic way that histories are written today ... Mr. Sides does an admirable job of balancing the book’s two storylines, explaining the upper-echelon politics that put the Marines in such a precarious position, and the on-the-ground planning, execution and sheer bravery that helped them escape. To Mr. Sides, the Marines’ Gen. Smith is the hero of the story, and rightly so. Smith had the better understanding of the conflict his men were thrust into, even as he was being thwarted at almost every turn by MacArthur and his staff.\