About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Bill Zehme
Positive The Los Angeles Times As much the definitive testimony of a Carson fan as it is a definitive biography, a decades-long labor of love ... Zehme’s research was voluminous ... More disturbing is Zehme’s willingness to underplay Carson’s lifelong habit of infidelity and his catastrophic relationship with alcohol ... Zehme is too good a journalist to ignore the more troubling aspects of his subject, who was often described off-stage as cold and aloof, but he is also too big a fan, perhaps, to explore them fully.
Pamela Anderson
Positive The Los Angeles Times The explosion of a deeply held cultural myth ... Reading and watching her own version of her life illuminates not just her own story, but the often hideous cultural hypocrisy at work in all forms of the entertainment industry and the media surrounding it ... In place of bitterness, we get the joys of motherhood; the solace and enlightenment of voracious reading ... Pamela Anderson has many interests, but dwelling on the past is not one of them. She will face it, yes, but she will not dwell. This is a rare quality worthy of admiration even if, despite the double-platform memoir, it leaves you with a limited understanding of who she is.
Elizabeth Crane
Positive The Los Angeles Times Crane, a novelist and short story writer, attempted to write her way out of grief, examining her marriage in granular detail. So granular that it is difficult at times not to scream while reading it, sometimes in frustration (she openly participates in her own denial) and sometimes in exquisite recognition ... In that way it reflects both marriage itself and the experience of listening to anyone talk about their own, past or present.
Joe Coulombe
Rave Los Angeles Times The tone is conversational, one man’s view of the world through the wine, spirit and grocery business, filled with the type of puns, literary references and bold-faced pronouncements that mark the store’s signage and its legendary promotional leaflet, the Fearless Flyer ... Though clearly written for fellow entrepreneurs and business types — for all his folksiness, Coulombe had an MBA from Stanford — and published under HarperCollins’ Leadership imprint, Becoming Trader Joe is much more than a \'how-to\' guide. Moving from the 1960s to the 1990s, it is also a tour of California’s shifting economy and culture, guided by one of its most original thinkers ... From the moment it begins at the Tail O’ the Cock on La Cienega Boulevard, Coulombe’s tale is a crazy-like-a-fox exploration of California culture through the lens of one wildly creative and well-read man always looking for a new way over, around or through. Entrepreneurs will no doubt find plenty of inspiration, but fans will find a fascinating origin story.
Sinéad O'Connor
Positive Los Angeles Times After years of serving as a punchline or a cautionary tale, she is speaking, and nobody is laughing now ... Rememberings is not, however, a manifesto, a polemic or even a confessional. It is certainly not anti-Catholic. Although O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018, changing her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, her memoir does not depict the church as an evil force ... Music runs through Rememberings like an underground stream; it’s there, feeding everything, though explanations of her connection to it surface only at rare intervals ... Memoirs are tricky things, and O’Connor’s is trickier than most, owing in part to her long and complicated relationship with fame. There is a fair amount of repetition and attempted record-straightening ... She has also attempted to maintain the privacy of those she writes about, including her siblings, her four children and, for the most part, their fathers, resulting in passages whose vagueness borders on stream-of-consciousness. To complicate things further, the book was written in two parts, divided by one of several breakdowns during which her voice, as she acknowledges, changed drastically. Not that anyone who paid any attention to her career would expect a traditional memoir from O’Connor, who has always chosen raw over polished ... we are more willing to listen.
Tina Fey
Rave The Los Angeles Times ...any concern that Fey, like so many before her, has been ruined by fame is quickly dispelled by Bossypants, a book that reminds you why Fey has succeeded where so many have failed — because she is precise, professional and hilarious ... inside lies a collection of autobiographical essays that should (but of course won’t) prove once and for all that pretty is nowhere near as important as funny, and funny doesn’t work without that rare balance of truth and heart ... In chapter after chapter, in a voice consistently recognizable as her own, Fey simply tells stories of her life ... Fey has a great sense of pace and timing — longer, weightier chapters dealing with her profession and her career are balanced with short pieces on being fat and being thin and some responses to evil email — and a love of language that echoes early Nora Ephron and, before that, the marvelous Jean Kerr ... Amazingly, absurdly, deliriously funny. Everything you would hope for from this book — it’s impossible to put down, you will laugh until you cry, you will wish it were longer, you can’t wait to hand it to every friend you have — is true.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Rave The Los Angeles Times ... fascinating detail and with a remarkably ego-free eye on the story’s enormous impact ... It is a binge-read of a book, propelled, for the most part, by a clear, adrenaline-spiking ticktock of how their stories came together, and studded with all manner of new astonishing details ... The stories Kantor and Twohey collected are familiar to anyone who followed the investigation, but to see them as they saw them, piling up in a sickening pattern from a wide array of women remains a gut-punch ... There are a few actual showdowns — Weinstein presents himself at the Times’ offices more than once — and plenty of pulse-racing excitement in She Said, but all of it is organic to the story rather than the storytellers ... By simply recounting their reporting, the two offer a masterful explanation of how a man like Weinstein is allowed to abuse his power and many women for so long in something approaching plain sight ... reminds us how difficult, tedious, frightening, frustrating and important the work of journalism remains ... a story like this proves the importance of skilled reporting and platforms that can afford to focus on months/years-long investigations ... not a perfect book. It wanders a bit toward the end.