About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Wendell Berry
Rave Booklist Deeply affecting ... Berry’s longtime readers know in advance that this is a work of essential American literature.
Jeremy Dauber
Positive Booklist Dauber...pithily and accurately describes hundreds of individual strips and books, colorfully expanding the limits of conventional definitions. This crammed chronicle will not soon be matched, let alone surpassed.
Richard Zenith
Rave Booklist Uniting all four poetic personae are an ambivalent regard for consciousness and for identity, and a restrained anxiety about knowledge and reality, perhaps because, as Reis says, \'There are more I’s than I myself.\' Zenith’s selection of Pessoa is a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century.
Mark Doty
Rave Booklist While all four sources receive Doty’s penetrating and illuminating scrutiny, the second, Whitman’s sexuality, which Doty shares, receives the most attention and the most autobiographical witnessing. Drawing on his own physical experience, Doty illustrates precisely what Whitman’s pervasive homoerotic imagery means and how it informs his poetic achievement and grand vision of life. The cosmic delight Doty adduces from Whitman’s sexuality burns bright throughout the book. Doty has given us a scintillating work of literary exegesis and gay memoir informed, as Whitman would want it, by heart, soul, and body alike.
Benjamin E. Park
Rave Booklist The 2016 opening to historians of Mormon archives about Nauvoo enables Park to name names and assign dates to the events leading up to the Mormon cataclysm. He fashions a dense, exciting, and absorbing narrative of the most consequential and dramatic movement to dissent against and secede from the Constitutional republic before the Civil War.
James Shapiro
Positive Booklist Filling out each chapter with vivid context, Shapiro could hardly be more engaging.
Neil Shubin
Rave Booklist ... exhilarating ... As he reveals these discoveries, along with other aspects of growth and change, Shubin also sketches the careers and achievements of dozens of great researchers, including women such as the long-neglected Julia Platt and Barbara McClintock. Shubin isn’t the most prolific popular-science writer, but he is one of the best.
Tom Holland
Positive Booklist The events in those chapters, as in their 19 successors, attest to Christian ideas and principles in ferment among historical actors. Notions such as the creation of the universe by a single creator, the absolute integrity of the individual, the distinct though overlapping authorities of church and state, constant improvement of persons and institutions, among others, affected, to the point of determining, the tendencies and outcomes of historical developments as the ages rolled by. How these ideas affected the practices of slavery, freedom of expression, and political and social rights, and altered the tenor of the times as recently as the 1960s are the meat of Holland’s flowing expository style, which resembles the narration of a very engaging broadcast documentary.
Ted Gioia
Rave Booklist More than on musicology—indeed, in reaction to its strictures—Gioia draws on social science research into the past and present to forge a sweeping and enthralling account of music as an agency of human change.
Dan Jones
Rave Booklist Jones’ sweeping coverage of a conflict of three centuries’ duration hews to the highest standards of popular history. It is literate, thoroughly engaging, and serious, without condescension towards either its matter or its readers. Jones cites and quotes primary sources only, inserting just the occasional demurrer about such matters as inflated casualty figures in the original histories. While the focus is on the West \'liberating\' the Holy Land, Jones cites Muslim sources whenever they sharpen that focus, and he profiles big players on both sides of the fray ... The scope of the Crusades alone encourages regarding their story as an epic, an account that defines the collective spirits of the civilizations that clashed in them.
Kevin Wilson
Positive Booklist Lillian tells the story, revealing immediately that she’s another of Wilson’s normal extraordinary protagonists ... She fills the book with her wry humor and large, embracing heart as she ponders the love of friendship and the love of family and then acts on what she discovers.
Anthony Everitt
Mixed Booklist Everitt’s new, no-nonsense presentation of Alexander’s life draws on the same collection of ancient sources all other biographers have consulted and avoids much re-interpretation. What happened is reported; why it happened, not so much. The particular problem for Alexandrian literature—that the conqueror’s father, Philip, is more intriguing—is neither acknowledged nor suppressed. The only complaint some may have is that, sans spin, Everitt’s prose can be demanding.
Richard Zoglin
Positive Booklist This is more about Vegas than Elvis, but the King’s fans should slurp it up anyway. Showbiz maven Zoglin is such a slick pop writer that his prose goes down like rainwater. He depends as much on living performers’ testimonies as on historical newspapers and other books ... What [Elvis] changed Vegas from and to constitutes rich, fascinating context in Zoglin’s smart book.
Gregory Orr
Positive Booklist ... in verse of astonishing verbal clarity—no polysyllabic scientific and philosophical trade vocabulary for Orr—and virtually invisible but adamantine technique, he achieves most of his aspirations. This is the work of one of our best poets.
Christopher Tyerman
Positive Booklist The main text of this copiously illustrated volume chronicles all of the Crusades and the waxing and waning of the crusading impulse ... An authoritative and beautiful browsing reference.
Campbell McGrath
Positive Booklist It’s hard to think of another contemporary poet who so reminds one of Whitman...and those later Whitmanians, Sandburg and Ginsberg, James Wright and Richard Hugo, in his frequently long-lined verses and rolling prose poems (a thick swatch of them in this five-part volume is like a festival of inspired short films) that habitually report on road trips and things that happen away from home,...He has companions—friends, wife, kids—along for the rides, but he remains attentive to the ways places look and his interactions with natives and other travelers. McGrath’s absorbing, amusing, and reflective traveling music entices us on the road yet again.
John Waters
Positive Booklist Waters may not be making any more movies (the last few flopped), but he’s a hot stand-up act, and nothing can squelch his outrageous imagination ... This is great stuff for fans ... If you don’t laugh loud and often, check your pulse, then your breath on a mirror.
David Baker
Rave Booklist Baker’s would be a poetry of a place except that the place is general, perhaps anywhere from Maine to the Midwest and out to Oregon that is on the edge of the rural. This place is a space for the entire life cycle of nonhumans and for the anxieties of observant humans ... With each poem delicately and sturdily crafted, this collection creates one of the great spaces in American poetry.
Oliver Sacks
Rave Booklist As polished and as intimately voiced—the author seems our bosom friend far more than an \'authority\'—as Sacks is at his best ... impossible to put down unfinished ... Since the 1970s, Anglo-American literature has boasted an astonishing number of excellent writing physicians and scientists. Consider Oliver Sacks their dean.
Martin Hägglund
Positive Booklist Book Marks Spreadsheet Revised Book Marks Spreadsheet Revised 100% 10 ...draws on and critiques such major thinkers as Aristotle, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Keynes, Hayek, Adorno, and Martin Luther King Jr.—without ever bogging down in philosophical jargon. As timely as a work of philosophy could be these days. Screen reader support enabled. ...draws on and critiques such major thinkers as Aristotle, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Keynes, Hayek, Adorno, and Martin Luther King Jr.—without ever bogging down in philosophical jargon. As timely as a work of philosophy could be these days. Rob Shapiro has joined the document.
Edward O Wilson
Positive Booklist Crucial to the broadest readership Genesis may attract is Wilson’s arresting belief that more germane insight will attend the study of insect eusociality...He adduces homosexuals and monastics as possible expressions of a eusocial nonreproductive caste among humans. Like virtually every one of Wilson’s books, deeply informative and provocative.
Scott G Bruce
Rave Booklist \"Bruce fluently translates most of the Latin originals, adapts Longfellow’s version for several selections from Dante’s Inferno, and succinctly introduces and abstracts particular historical periods and each selection. Besides well- and fairly-well-known sources (Homer, Virgil, Bede, Aquinas, etc.), Bruce extracts fascinating less-known items, such as the gruesome twelfth-century Vision of Tundale and Victorian priest John Furniss’ merciless depiction of children in Hell. Consider this the grown-up’s My First Book on its subject.\
Ha Jin
Positive Booklist [Li Ba\'s] life, as distinguished poet and fiction writer Ha Jin so limpidly relays it, was peripatetic rather than domestic, usually away from the family he strove to support ... Li Bai still stands, with his friend Du Fu, at the pinnacle of Chinese poetry, and his influence is extensive the world over.
Robert Bly
Positive Booklist The 1980s books lay the groundwork for the mythopoetic men’s movement ... The 1990s collections communicate more directly than those before and after them ... physical and mental images associate across time, places, and cultures by means of emotion and revelation rather than logic or rhetoric. Magnificent.
Jane Glover
Rave Booklist ...a biography of such gusto and brilliance that it is as pleasurable as informative ... Glover illuminates every aspect of Handel’s work and describes the plots and musical distinctions of most of the operas and oratorios so fetchingly that the reader itches to hear and see them. She also brings Handel’s times and most constant collaborators, sponsors, and antagonists to vivid life as she keeps the rather-elusive maestro, who wrote almost nothing about himself, firmly in focus.
Bertolt Brecht
Rave Booklist This immense book of poems couldn’t be less obscure or difficult—not that they lack subtleties, especially of voice ... The poetry of protest—against war, fascism, prostitution, poverty, cruelty, and callousness—has no finer practitioner, whose work these formally faithful translations make almost as powerful in English as in German.
William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
Positive Booklist You wouldn’t think that a book made up of barely planned conversation by not just its principals but anybody else who commented at all relevantly and within mic range would be anything other than a trial to read. And maybe you have to be interested in or knowledgeable about the main participants—the two longest-lived stars of the Beat Generation—to really dig it. But if you are, you very probably will ... For Beat aficionados, the book will resemble a light, pungent dessert.
Neil MacGregor
Positive Booklist The writing is clear and personable, and the illustrations nothing short of spectacular—230 images in both color and black and white. A fine popular work on the material history of religion.
Mark Dery
Rave Booklist Peculiar to a T, Gorey and his work are eccentric in the most congenial and appealing way, and cultural critic Dery gives them a book that matches them in ingratiation, fascination, and artfulness.
Tom Ewing
Rave Booklist [Ewing] writes very well, indeed, if, as chronicles are wont to encourage, without razzamatazz. He presents information narratively, not via charts, lists, itineraries, and the like, and he preserves the vernacular wording, grammatical gaffes and all, of his informants. Every performance and recording seem accounted for, and any future biographers per se will just have to make this book their number-one resource. Plain bluegrass fans will worship and adore Ewing’s achievement.
Meghan O'Gieblyn
Positive Booklist Topicality and personal experience merge to afford insight ... O\'Gieblyn conjures midwestern angst with humor and dread ... examines without a particle of condescension ... considers with grace, wit, and compassion.
Alan Walker
Rave Booklist Walker\'s writing is as limpid and engaging as his subject’s music ... this is much less an analysis and appreciation than a \'life and times\' ... Informed by the latest discoveries about the composer, Walker’s biography is a towering and beautiful achievement.
Stephen Walsh
Rave Booklist In the...outstanding Debussy, Walsh offers yet another kind of book about a composer, a work-life with just enough extramusical detail to claim being a biography ... Walsh discusses nearly every one of Debussy’s compositions and points out their innovations and their narratives, so to speak—and speak pertinently, for Debussy was as concerned with literature as any great musician ever has been.
Ersi Sotiropoulos, Trans. by Karen Emmerich
Positive Booklist A colorful fabric of Cavafy’s memories and reflections, Sotiropoulos’ speculative fiction may be too psychosexually intimate for some (Cavafy abashedly masturbates a few times), while others will relish its Proustian aspiration.
Judith Chernaik
Rave Booklist \"Following Beethoven’s lead, most of the greatest Romantic composers became, of necessity, entrepreneurs and legends in their own time. None of their stories is sadder than Robert Schumann’s, involving as it does a haunted conscience; a tremendous struggle for personal happiness; a steady flow of musical creativity; and then, long-drawn-out mental and physical collapse. (Chernaik) fills the book with descriptions of Schumann’s compositions that are more easily followed and more thorough than most recording liner notes and that convincingly relate each piece to Schumann’s life circumstances as well as to his other music—all without excerpting musical scores ... Altogether outstanding. \
Antonia Fraser
Positive Booklist \"Fraser’s fourteenth work of nonfiction opens with one of the biggest bangs in English history, the extraordinarily destructive Gordon Riots of 1780 protesting the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which legalized priests, Catholic schools, and Catholic inheritance, balanced only by amending the oath of allegiance to repudiate the pope’s \'temporal\' authority ... The chief heroes of the long Catholic emancipation campaign were Kerry County Catholic Daniel O’Connell, who insisted on nonviolence, and the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, whose insistent political pragmatism finally convinced the king ... As she has accomplished with so much modern British history, Fraser makes the story of the Catholic Question’s resolution riveting. \
Ward Farnsworth
Positive Booklist This sturdy and engaging introductory text consists mostly of excerpts from the ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers, especially Seneca (4 BCE–65), Epictetus (c. 55–135) through his student Arrian, and Marcus Aurelius (121–80) as well as that trio’s philosophical confreres, from the earlier Hellenic Stoics and Cicero to such contemporaries as Plutarch to moderns, including Montaigne, Adam Smith, and Schopenhauer ... A philosophy to live by, Stoicism may remind many of Buddhism and Quakerism, for it asks of practitioners something very similar to what those disciplines call mindfulness.
Steven R. Weisman
Mixed Booklist Online \"...The North-South polarity of the two aggregations eventually contributed to bitter conflict among American Jews over slavery, as Weisman discusses within the context of the overarching challenges for an old religion in a new world ... That story, of nineteenth-century heroes, such as reformer Isaac Mayer Wise and traditionalist Isaac Leeser, predominates in Weisman’s often...account, which always keeps one eye on how encounters with American freedoms and egalitarianism shaped the quest for overall unity that faced new but not more vital challenges in the twentieth century. Though sometimes clumsily written, especially toward the end, a keenly interesting chapter of American and Jewish history.
Charles S. Cockell
Rave Booklist Online \"Cockell leads up to that big message in gratifying chapters about much smaller things—ants, moles, cells, molecules, and atomic particles—and the physics that explains them and their biological functions. The last chapter reconsiders the role of contingency—the chance occurrence that changes something—in light of what the melding of physics and biology reveals about life processes and forms. Both magisterial and collegial, this may be the biology book of the year.\
Ingrid Rossellini
Positive Booklist Online Rumors of the death of Western civilization must be questioned when a work of popular history as absorbing and readable as this is published. While necessarily recording major political events in the successive eras she covers, Rossellini forefronts philosophy, literature, representational art, and architecture, and how those disciplines express conceptions of human nature.
Catherine Nixey
Positive Booklist Nixey clearly but untendentiously summarizes phenomena that led up to the elimination of classical polytheism, such as imperial persecutions of Christians by emperors before Constantine and the intellectual refutation of Christianity by philosophers whose works were later expunged, and actual incidences and kinds of persecution, 385–532 CE—that is, between the destruction of Athena’s temple in Palmyra and the expatriation of the last philosophers of the Athenian Academy, founded by Plato in 387 BCE. This history is too little known, she says, in an era, the present, that ill appreciates the dangers of monotheism.
Donald Hall
Rave Booklist ...in the section \'The Selected Poets of Donald Hall,\' to which poetry lovers may turn first and be delightfully surprised to discover they’re more gossip than critique. There is much more about poetry, of course, most notably the longest entry, \'Necropoetics,\' about elegies and other poems of death, ending with his for his wife, the late Jane Kenyon. Another longer piece may be the best: \'Walking to Portsmouth\' tells the story behind Hall’s Caldecott Medalist children’s book, The Ox-Cart Man (1979). But they’re all good.
Wendell Berry
Rave Booklist Berry is the philosopher and the prophet of agriculture, community, stability, and friendship, and there is nothing sentimental or utopian anywhere in his advocacy of those things. Rather, he is humbly empirical ... He is precise about America’s great delusions ... There is much more, all, yes, essential.
Ted Kooser
Rave Booklist There are no big shots here, but plenty of family, neighbors, and dogs. And there is always himself, constantly observing, like a benevolent spy, whether at home or, as in Winter Morning Walks (2000), abroad. Gratifying selections from those and his other books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Delights & Shadows (2004), reappear herein, alongside many new poems, generally in a strongly musical quasi-blank verse and reflecting his current status as an old man we all wish we knew.
Patrick Parr
Positive Booklist Parr accounts more fully for Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminary education than has any complete biography of the civil rights icon ... A journalist rather than an academic, Parr writes appreciatively and even informally about his subject and drops a few gossipy tidbits, including King’s habitual plagiarism in his school papers and why his professors seldom noticed it.
Alan Lightman
Positive Booklist Physicist-novelist Lightman (Screening Room, 2015) strives to, if not reconcile, at least put religion and science on good speaking terms. These personal and historical essays on religion, science, and religion-and-science are assembled to draw the reader ever deeper in ... An illuminating, deeply human book.
Ross Douthat
Rave Booklist Online \"New York Times editorialist Douthat believes Pope Francis is one of the most consequential Roman Catholic leaders ever. His own ambiguous demurrals notwithstanding, Francis is trying hard to change the church ... If the church under Francis comes to allow communion to civil divorcées, does it undermine its sine qua non basis in Christ’s explicit teaching? That question animates Douthat’s book, which is an absorbing chapter, not just in the pope’s but in the church’s life story.\
Jonathan Blunk
Rave Booklist [Wright] kept a voluminous journal that Blunk mines extensively in this seamless fine-fabric of a biography that, while limning its subject with great compassion, arouses a powerful appetite for Wright’s writing as well as that of his beloved forebears and colleagues.
Peter Parker
Rave Booklist Writing with elegance and an informed knowledge of the subject both deep and broad, Parker contributes a cultural history that itself is as distinguished a work of literature as its focus, a book often considered the first great classic of modern literature in English.
Lyndal Roper
Rave Booklist Facilitating Roper’s pursuit is the ocean of writing Luther and his fellow reformers produced with great candor, vehemence, and rancor. Luther wasn’t an easy man, and he fell out with many great associates, cowed others, and disconcerted much of his wider following by refusing to rebel against secular as well as religious authority (more disconcerting nowadays is his hallucinatory anti-Semitism). Arguably the most consequential figure in Western history between Jesus and Napoléon, Luther fully merits the grace and perceptiveness of Roper’s fine book.