About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Wright Thompson
Positive The Wall Street Journal Thompson’s sweeping, meditative and sometimes overwrought chronicle seems intended to keep the colloquy going.
M G Sheftall
Positive The Wall Street Journal Sweeping and vivid ... A highly readable, even-tempered work of history that suffers from an unfortunate lack of decent maps. The publisher has included only two, each dotted with unexplained numbers and useless as a tool of understanding.
Susannah Gibson
Rave The Wall Street Journal \"Susannah Gibson has put Johnson at the margins and women at the center in The Bluestockings, a vivid and absorbing series of interwoven biographies of some of the era’s most fascinating and accomplished females ... Among the many pleasures of The Bluestockings is the reminder that history doesn’t consist of the churning of vast impersonal forces but has at its heart the personalities and ambitions of singular men and women. Greatness too may begin in actions as small as picking up a pen or inviting a few smart people around for tea.\
Rachelle Bergstein
Positive The Wall Street Journal The loyalties of Ms. Bergstein,...lie firmly with Ms. Blume. She writes with sympathy of the author’s dismay at the Reagan-era pushback and with considerable heat of the efforts by conservative parents and activists today to get ideological and sexually explicit books out of school libraries.
Kathryn Hughes
Positive The Wall Street Journal Sparkling ... Cat fanciers will find all manner of diversion in Catland, but believe it or not the book has something for cat-haters, too.
Jonathan Haidt
Rave The Wall Street Journal Haidt lays out in pitiless detail what happened to the children of Generation Z when life moved online ... A bitter read but also a galvanizing one ... Haidt describes how we might spare rising generations the same afflictions.
Katherine Spillar
Mixed The Wall Street Journal Gives insight into feminist thinking mostly through what it presents but partly through what it veils.
Charlotte Gray
Positive The Wall Street Journal The social-justice smugness...does not seem to bode well for what will follow. And indeed, a few pages later...Ms. Gray introduces slavery as if readers have never heard of it ... And then suddenly, mercifully, the scolding ends ... Gray persuasively argues that the mothers were crucial in shaping the habits and actions of their sons ... Gray’s sensitivity to the shifting and sometimes unkind judgments of history makes even stranger her inclusion of the contemporary grievances that appear at the start of the book ... It would be a shame if readers were to be put off by the faddishness and miss what is otherwise a terrific and insightful double biography. Stick with it past page 53.
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Positive The Wall Street Journal One of the most appealing and encouraging aspects of Never Enough is the author’s warm-hearted enthusiasm for rewriting pernicious norms ... Ms. Wallace offers practical steps for us adults to take to reorient both ourselves and our children, and to relieve their psychological burdens.
Christian Madsbjerg
Positive The Wall Street Journal Full of intriguing goodies ... There’s a lot here, and a lot of it makes sense, but there are moments when the argument is so diffuse as to feel precarious. At times Mr. Madsbjerg teeters on the edge of banality, even incoherence. Yet he never tips over, for there is unmistakably truth in what he’s getting at.
Rebecca Boggs Roberts
Rave The Wall Street Journal Fast-moving, sure-footed ... Untold Power is a delightful read. Ms. Roberts, a historian of American women’s suffrage, has clearly enjoyed getting to know her subject, in part through unpublished chapters of Edith’s memoirs. Yet she doesn’t valorize Edith unduly. She treats with tactful historical perspective certain retrograde attitudes of both the president and Mrs. Wilson, but she doesn’t skip over them, either.
Allegra Goodman
Rave The Wall Street Journal In Sam Ms. Goodman has turned simplicity itself into a powerful tool for evoking how it feels to be young ... She is particularly good at revealing how adult speech shapes the way young people think about themselves and imagine the contours of their world ... In Sam, the heights our heroine reaches are not so dizzying, but that she ascends at all is a reason to cheer.
Eri Hotta
Positive The Wall Street Journal Hotta begins Suzuki midway through her subject’s life ... Hotta is an unobtrusive narrator whose personal anecdotes are like grace notes on the larger score of Suzuki’s life ... In Ms. Hotta’s experience we can descry the origins of the fearsome stereotype.
Rina Raphael
Rave Wall Street Journal Ms. Raphael keeps up a jaunty pace in The Gospel of Wellness and mixes her metaphors with cheerful abandon ... She’s particularly good at pointing out the credulity of too many consumers.
Lionel Shriver
Positive The Wall Street Journal This piece, like several others in Abominations, reveals a tender side to Ms. Shriver. In print she is formidable—she is unfailingly formidable—but evidently she has feelings like the rest of us ... Ms. Shriver’s roving curiosity, her libertarian inclinations and her trans-Atlantic orientation (she resides mostly in England and lived for more than a decade in Northern Ireland) make her a rare voice, someone who challenges orthodoxies in the way that many journalists and public intellectuals claim to do but don’t. It is bracing to spend time in the company of such a smart, plain-spoken and unpredictable person.
Felix Salten, Tr. Jack Zipes
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... almost unremittingly dark and pessimistic ... If [earlier translater and Soviet spy Whittaker] Chambers was engaged in...political legerdemain, given that his translation informed the Disney movie that became, in time, all that most people know of Bambi, this new edition by Mr. Zipes is doubly welcome. Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a bleak book, occasionally stilted in its language but also bracingly free of the encrustation of sugar that the tale has accumulated over the past 100 years. It’s a funny thing, though: Both Felix Salten and Jack Zipes owe a debt of gratitude to Walt Disney. Had Bambi not been Disneyfied, we probably wouldn’t be talking about him at all.
Marta McDowell
Positive Wall Street Journal Affectionate and informative, Unearthing the Secret Garden is not unlike a garden itself, with its smooth lawns of prose and striking shows of illustration and photography ... Gardeners are forever swiping ideas from one another. The green-of-thumb will find plenty to inspire in this engaging account, which includes an inventory of all Burnett’s favorite ornamentals.
June Cummins, With Alexandra Dunietz
Positive Wall Street Journal [An] expansive and detailed biography ... Real life is messy. Perhaps the only lasting way to tidy it up is to be selective in the stories we tell about it. This fine first biography of Sydney Taylor shows how well that can be done.
Leslie Brody
Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a highly enjoyable biography by Leslie Brody, a professor at the University of Redlands in California and the author of a 2010 biography of Jessica Mitford ... Ms. Brody’s engaging biography reminds us how fragile and serendipitous artistic beginnings can be, yet how mighty and enduring their endings.
Suzanne Collins
Mixed The Wall Street Journal The events are all related in deadly earnest, but there is what seems to be unintentional comedy in Ms. Collins’s choice of names for her minor characters ... Ms. Collins should be commended for conjuring Coriolanus and his grim surroundings in the relatively graceful past tense rather than the grinding present tense of the trilogy. She is not a subtle stylist, though, and in places the prose is so wooden that Katniss could fashion arrows from it...That said, Hunger Games devotees will probably be too busy relishing their return to Panem to care. Readers who enjoyed the details of gladiatorial game-making in the trilogy will find all sorts of satisfying explanations for why things developed the way they did ... One has the sense that Ms. Collins is in a hurry to get to her foregone conclusion. There is a point in the novel at which Coriolanus describes himself feeling \'like a marionette being jerked here and there by invisible strings.\' That’s a pretty good description of what happens to the reader of this exhausting book, already a bestseller.
David Kamp
Positive The Wall Street Journal For a broad cohort of readers, experiencing David Kamp’s history of the golden age of children’s television will be like spinning the dial on a radio set to pick up frequencies from childhood. As you turn the pages, songs and jingles from half-forgotten TV episodes start dancing through your head...If the tune brings happy associations, you’ll find much to appreciate in this affectionate chronicle of an exuberant cultural moment ... Whether it really nudged the needle of child literacy and numeracy is a question that Mr. Kamp touches on only lightly; his bias is toward affirmation, but this is not the book to consult for an exhaustive reckoning of monies spent and trajectories altered ... full of such nostalgic jolts for readers who grew up in those years. The book doesn’t paint a full picture of what happened, or what it all meant, but it makes the era a pleasure to revisit. And the songs!
Philip Pullman
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Pullman is a storyteller, not a lyricist; his writing is clear, clean and forceful, never striving for effect and all the more effective because of it. He’s also a man of ideas, which gives great savor to his work even if the ideas themselves are not universally congenial ... Mr. Pullman comes across as notably less hostile than in his earlier books to the notion, if not the exact description, of a divine benevolence.
Brian Jay Jones
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... fluid and enjoyable ... In this lively chronicle, Mr. Jones tackles the controversial elements of the Seussian oeuvre in a forthright way, setting them in the context of both the times and his subject’s own life. His is a temperate perspective that doesn’t spare Dr. Seuss the judgments of the present but that doesn’t calumniate him for failing to anticipate the demands of what was then the unknowable future.
Markus Zusak
Rave The Wall Street Journal \"... yet this book too is a stunner. Devastating, demanding and deeply moving, Bridge of Clay... unspools like a kind of magic act in reverse, with feats of narrative legerdemain concealed by misdirection that all make sense only when the elements of the trick are finally laid out ... Grief and sacrifice lie at the heart of things, and we can feel it through Mr. Zusak’s writing even before we understand the story’s real contours... His style is like free verse, at once spare and dense with feeling and meaning.\
Anne Boyd Rioux
Rave Wall Street Journal When Little Women first appeared, readers and reviewers were astonished by how new and original it was, Ms. Rioux writes. Most literature for children at the time was \'so stilted and pious that it failed to capture the attention of young readers.\' Alcott’s...prose, with its informal dialogue, came as something of a revelation. From the vivid, fire-lit opening scene, with the teenage Marches bemoaning their poverty and the prospect of Christmas without their father, each girl has a distinct voice that hints, as Ms. Rioux says, \'at her unique personality.\' ... the author observes, \'Alcott’s classic pointed the way not only toward girls’ future selves but also toward the future relationships they could have with men and with each other. She imagined her characters moving into a mature womanhood that achieves self-fulfillment as well as shared joys and responsibilities, a storyline today’s little women desperately need.\' She’s right about that. The thoughtful pages of Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy amount to a plea: Let us not forget these girls! We still need them.
Philip Pullman
Positive The Wall Street Journal ...[a] gripping, vivid and upsetting book ... The author also makes wonderful use in this book of what must surely be his most enchanting contribution to literature: the daemon...For the novelist, and for the reader, daemons add a rich textual dimension: betraying the dark heart of a smiling villain; creating the opportunity for dialogue when a person is otherwise alone; allowing a character to hear and see things that his human senses might miss ... 'I’m profoundly interested in religion,' Mr. Pullman has written, 'and I think it’s extremely important to understand it. I’ve been trying to understand it all my life.' That is the strange beauty, the fearful symmetry even, at the heart of his novels about Lyra. Philip Pullman is a Jacob, wrestling with an angel: He grapples and battles in the darkness, but he cannot let go.
John Green
Positive The Wall Street Journal In Turtles All the Way Down, Mr. Green shows the same writerly panache, but there is a bruised weariness in his principal characters that creates a more subdued experience for the reader ... This being a John Green book, the dialogue is snappy and sophisticated, and the characters invested with a sensibility, articulateness and aspirational range of reference that are so appealing to intelligent young readers ... Having wept through The Fault in Our Stars in both its book and movie versions, enthusiasts will want to know: Does Turtles All the Way Down offer the same sort of cathartic transport? It doesn’t, but perhaps it couldn’t. While there is tenderness and wisdom here, and a high quotient of big ideas, too, the stakes are lower, and so the drama is somewhat diminished ... There is arduous and unhappy turmoil aplenty in Turtles All the Way Down, but by the end readers ages 14 and older will find themselves, like Davis and Aza, in a place of hopeful ambiguity.
Bruce Handy
Rave The Wall Street Journal ...a charming, discursive encounter with classic children’s literature from the perspective of a parent ... For parents who are embarking on this phase of rediscovery, for those in the thick of it, and for those for whom it is a warm and recent memory, Wild Things will be a delightful excursion. Mr. Handy writes with zip, sincerity and good humor. He has a gift for witty phrasing ... engaging and full of genuine feeling.
Jonathan Cott
Rave The Wall Street Journal Their perspectives on Sendak’s work, juxtaposed with Mr. Cott’s own exchanges with the artist, illuminate Sendak’s books and psyche to remarkable effect. Enriched throughout with images of Sendak’s art, the book will be catnip for those who already admire him. Non-enthusiasts who never warmed to his more discomfiting books as children or, as adults, to either his work or his irascible manner may find themselves surprised, sympathetic and enchanted ... In this riveting account of Sendak’s vision, Mr. Cott captures the pain and glory of the creative process: moments of soaring grandiosity and times of grinding struggle, of words and images that won’t come or that come in the wrong way.
Amy Gary
Positive The Wall Street Journal If the measure of a good life story is the longing it leaves in the reader to have known the subject, this one more than succeeds ... what some readers may feel a weakness of the book: that only at the very beginning and very end of In the Great Green Room do we hear Brown’s own voice. Each chapter starts with a bit of her poetry, including some unpublished verses, which is something, but in following the events of her life, we are vouchsafed only Ms. Gary’s representation of her thoughts and feelings. Through a publicist, the author explains that she wanted to keep the reader 'in the moment with Margaret' and that the abundance of her sources made paraphrasing the best course. Still, we may feel a bit wistful, as we finish reading this fascinating account, that we weren’t able to get somehow even closer to the undoubtedly bold and brilliant Margaret Wise Brown.