About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jim Rasenberger
Positive The Washington Post Rasenberger’s narrative is, to a surprising degree, the story of America in the first half of the 19th century. It overflows with relentless ambition, energy, entrepreneurship, ingenuity and wealth, and with deceit, fraud, jingoism and murder.
Andrew S. Curran
Positive The New Republic \"While Curran does not reveal any startling new facts about Diderot’s life or work, his fluent and spirited book surpasses its predecessor in finding a center of gravity in the Enlightenment’s most kaleidoscopic thinker ... [Curran\'s book contains] a series of brilliant and often hilarious stratagems.\
Alan Taylor
Rave The Minneapolis Star Taylor makes the familiar events seem shockingly, and thrillingly, new. Instead of treating the revolution as a series of discrete episodes in an inexorable march toward freedom, he puts the revolution in context. Its celebrated accomplishments become tiny threads in the vast tapestry of 18th-century geopolitics, economics and social transformation. Taylor seeks to convey, as he puts it, 'the multiple and clashing visions of revolution pursued by the diverse American peoples of the continent.' The result is a completely new understanding of the revolutionary era.
Annette Gordon Reed and Peter S. Onuf
Positive The New Republic Much of the fascination of the book is that, in a relatively short span, it examines Jefferson not only as statesman and plantation owner, but also as philosopher, scientist, author, musician, inventor, architect, educator, father, and friend ... I suspect this new book will cause controversy [because] it takes Jefferson’s perspective seriously at a time when his reputation is at a low in some quarters, especially college campuses and Broadway. Readers may be unwilling or unable to swallow the potent dram of generosity needed to see the world through a slave owner’s eyes, even one who claimed to hate slavery and who wrote some of history’s most influential words of liberation. In their search for understanding rather than for comfortable bromides, Gordon-Reed and Onuf exemplify a virtue that Jefferson admired, even though, in this case, it does not always tend to his advantage.
Sarah Bakewell
Positive Newsday Bakewell writes with a sunny disposition and light touch that are sometimes at odds with the fact that many of these thinkers suffered from severe poverty and illness (both physical and mental) and that their works were written in response not only to personal suffering but to horrors such as the Holocaust, gulags and Algerian War. With that said, she combines confident handling of difficult philosophical concepts with a highly enjoyable writing style. I can’t think of a better introduction to modern intellectual history.
Geoffrey Cowan
Positive The Boston Globe The 1912 convention in Chicago was chaos from beginning to end, and Cowan skillfully leads the reader through the complicated, hour-by-hour machinations.