About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Frank Trentmann
Rave The Times (UK) Terrifically insightful ... This book runs to 838 pages, but barely a word is wasted. Trentmann is a skilful and unflashy storyteller with flickers of gentle irony.
Katja Hoyer
Rave The Times (UK) Breakneck and lurid, subtle and momentous, the story of the German empire is the sort of subject that could overwhelm a seasoned television don with 1,200 pages to play with, let alone a debut writer with 239 ... Yet in Blood and Iron Katja Hoyer, a German-born historian living in Sussex, more or less pulls it off, rattling stylishly through the long century from the humbling of Napoleon to the abdication of Wilhelm II in a book so short you could wolf it down in six or seven hours, were you so minded ... Hoyer renders a vivid account of Wilhelm’s overweening ineptitude ... The book’s brevity results in a certain breathlessness. Inevitably many things are missing or too lightly touched on...Complex scholarly debates over questions such as the Schlieffen plan and the causes of the First World War are sometimes concertinaed more than I would like ... These forgivable shortcomings aside, Hoyer has mastered an intimidating jungle of material and written a balanced and hugely accessible introduction to the age when Germany became Germany.
Kati Marton
Mixed The Times (UK) The English-speaking world has had a long wait for its first seriously good book on Angela Merkel, even though she has been chancellor for 16 years and on the front line of German politics for 31. The Chancellor, a biography published with much fanfare by the Hungarian-American journalist Kati Marton, is manifestly not that book ... if any foreign observer were in a position to do it justice, you might think it would be Marton ... This does at least deliver a fund of entertaining anecdotes ... he book correctly underlines the importance of Merkel’s Protestant faith and upbringing on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall...It is especially strong on her distinctive and extensive reading of history ... Marton is also good value on Merkel’s mind games with Vladimir Putin and her relationships with three US presidents ... Yet this book is fatally undermined by two cardinal faults. The first is that the author is too close to her subject...Her occasional criticisms are sluiced away by a sickly tide of hagiography ... The second and graver problem is Marton’s raunchily casual relationship with the facts. She drops clanger after cast-iron clanger ... Presumably these errors will be corrected in future editions, unless the publisher does the decent thing and pulps every copy of this balderdash. Harder to fix, though, is the irremediable incuriosity and ignorance of German and European politics they betray ... The book’s account of virtually every aspect of Germany’s political system, from coalition formation to Covid policy, is variously shallow, incomplete, misleading or flatly wrong ... On the back of the book a puff quote from a Pulitzer prizewinning writer hails Marton’s \'signature superpower of rigorous research\'. It seems this superpower does not extend to footnotes, basic fact-checking, kicking the tyres on apocryphal anecdotes or indeed reading German newspapers. Either that or the author has been freebasing kryptonite these past four years.
Uwe Schütte
Mixed The Times (UK) \"This book does not initially exude promise. For one thing, it is written in a lightly retouched academese that makes few concessions to a popular audience. Schütte expects his readers to know the surnames of obscure cultural critics who continually pop up in the text like old friends. For another, he refuses to indulge in what he calls \'gossip\' about the band, and what an irredeemable philistine such as muggins here would think of as basic biographical information. Kraftwerk’s oeuvre is to be taken at face value and deep artistic intent read into their every decision. This seems a bit much ... Despite the author’s reluctance to dirty his hands with trivia, there are flashes of appealing anecdote ... As a primer on the band’s music, the book is pretty good. Outside 19th-century travel guides, few subjects have given rise to such a volume of execrably bad writing as electronic music. Schütte, by contrast, is admirably precise about what he likes, and excellent value on Kraftwerk’s often derided later work, which he describes as a permanent process of remixing and updating. It would have been nice to have had a less hagiographic reckoning with the actual albums, though. \
Avi Loeb
Mixed The Times (UK) I have a lot of time for Loeb. He has a joy in conjecture and an omnivorous spirit of inquiry that are more reminiscent of 20th-century thinkers such as Freeman Dyson or Carl Sagan than most of his peers. His readiness to stake his reputation on such an unconventional hypothesis is a mark of uncommon bravery...But this is a pretty thin book. It’s thin in a literal sense: the core thesis, which does not amount to more than a Scientific American cover feature, is padded out about 200 pages with excursions into memoir, the Sherlock Holmes stories and the imponderability of black holes ... More pertinently, the list of observations about ‘Oumuamua that don’t add up is a tenuous strut upon which to build a vast bridge of conjecture that stretches into planet-sized beacons engineered to power space probes and rocks bearing life to Earth from distant stars ... All the same, it’s a commendable thing that someone of Loeb’s stature is prepared to ask these questions ... Perhaps with time ‘Oumuamua will turn out to be the most important anomaly in the history of science. Perhaps. I think, at any rate, that Sagan would have liked this book.
Wolfram Eilenberger
Rave The Times (UK) Time of the Magicians is worthy of the hype that enveloped it in Germany, where it has sold more than 100,000 copies — that is, a hundred times as many as any of Benjamin’s works in their first print run. It is a tremendous feat of scholarship, but more pertinently it is also a technical masterpiece, knitting together the four men’s love lives, money troubles, ontological anxieties and the wider ferment of the Weimar republic with uncommon dexterity ... My only substantial complaint is that Eilenberger does not always do as much as he might to untangle some of the more 14-dimensional knots of abstraction for a bonehead like me. At times I found myself oscillating between repeated futile assaults on Wittgenstein’s notion of the “statement as picture of reality” and staring helplessly for minutes on end at the pigeons nesting outside my window, thinking how nice it would be to be a pigeon and not to have to grapple with Wittgenstein.
Hannah Fry
Mixed The Times UK ...Hannah Fry, a mathematician...has produced is a stylish, thoughtful and scrupulously fair-minded account of what the software that increasingly governs our world can and cannot do ... The best chapters in Hello World deal with crime and justice. Algorithms are already pervasive in policing. The Kent force uses a package called PredPol, which can forecast where in the county crime is likely and so direct its patrols. Durham constabulary has a piece of artificial intelligence that can calculate the risk that suspects will reoffend ... Probably the most annoying thing a critic can do to a writer is to chastise them for leaving things out. Of course they do. That’s what writing is. All the same, this book is scarcely 200 pages long, and I would very much have liked to read more of Fry’s insights into the way algorithms work in politics, advertising and social media...Still, Hello World ranks alongside Timandra Harkness’s Big Data and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction as one of the best books yet written on data and algorithms.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Rave The Times (UK) Do not buy Red Moon for its literary merits ... There are great indigestible tracts of expository dialogue. There is a horrible doldrum of narrative drift in the middle as the physicist and the princess fester away in Hong Kong. The ending is abrupt and anticlimactic ... Read this book instead for its thorough and irresistible imagination. Read it as an extended love letter to China. Read it for its insights into the impossibility of total surveillance, the limitations of machine learning, the unbearable brightness of sunshine on the Moon’s dead surface and the true nature of power. Read it as the work of a man who has looked long and hard at the modern world and seen it for what it is with the clear gaze of a hyper-informed stranger. On its own terms – and it should not really be judged by any other standard — Red Moon is a masterpiece.
Michio Kaku
Pan The Times (UK) \"Kaku is an international treasure and a man of infectious enthusiasm. You may as well kick an endangered penguin as give one of his books a bad review. But this is a weary, clunkily written and incoherent piece of work. It is hard to know who is supposed to read it ... It is not just boring: it is depressing. Barring a handful of recent discoveries in astronomy, such as dark energy and the observation of 16 possibly habitable planets orbiting distant stars, the book could have been written before many of its potential readers were born ... It hardly helps that the book is stuffed with bizarre sweeping statements and factual mistakes.\