About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Yaroslav Trofimov
Rave The Irish Times (IRE) Trofimov is a rare instance of a reporter having first-hand knowledge of the country’s history and culture, not to mention ready access to many of its institutions, notably the army and its various ancillary units. This is reflected in the vivid reporting from the front ... Trofimov provides an excellent first draft of the war.
Sung-Yoon Lee
Mixed Irish Times (IRE) Much of Lee’s analysis is sound and his hawkishness on North Korea has often been proven right. But this doesn’t necessarily make for a great book. The Sister has a rather one-note air to it. There is not much in the way of nuance in its analysis of South Korea’s response to Pyongyang and on more than one occasion the book veers into tendentiousness ... A less aware reader might get the impression from this book that Moon Jae-in was a sleeper agent of Pyongyang rather than a well-meaning naif whose desire for rapprochement may have been motivated by the fact that, as with many South Koreans, his family originally comes from the pre-war north. Lee is entitled to write the book he chooses, one where South Korean politics and society are a mere backdrop to the geopolitical stand-off with the DPRK. But the scant context and nuance mean The Sister, for all its merits, is a rather undercooked polemic.
Ai Weiwei, Trans. by Allan H. Barr
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) The chapters that recount his detention (and his prior harassment by the police) are among the book’s most enthralling, leavened with a dark humour and a humane respect for his captors, both browbeaten police forced to pay their own expenses and peasant soldiers. Ai also uses the discussions he had with his interrogators to flesh out the thinking behind his art, which western readers might find an invaluable exegesis ... much better written than the average autobiography. Ai’s prose has a breezy poeticism to it, well rendered in Allan H Barr’s fluid translation. It presents a fascinating, if at times self-satisfied, portrait of a polymath who remains only partially understood in the West, and one who has a far greater faith in his fellow citizens than the government that continues to rule over them does.
C Pam Zhang
Positive The Irish Times (IRE) Zhang’s novel is not quite as thematically groundbreaking as its publicity would have it...is, however, novel in the way it foregrounds Chinese women in the Old West ... Zhang is adept at casting the structural modes of power in ordinary observations ... a pessimistic work, given the historical experience of Chinese migrants in the period in question. Zhang’s well-calibrated but unfussy prose is reminiscent of both Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison...But there is also a mystical tenor that cuts through the flinty realism, with a tiger, one of the most redoubtable animals of the Chinese zodiac, prowling throughout, an avatar of the departed mother, haunting a narrative that has at its heart an unspoken tragedy that ultimately destroys the family ... If Zhang might be accused of endowing her novel with one flaw, it is that the notion of identity is sometimes mediated through language and ideas that are just a bit too contemporary. That said, it’s an anachronism more discursive than material and one that can be forgiven in what is otherwise a fine debut.