About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Nell Irvin Painter
Rave The Washington Post Nell Irvin Painter addresses readers in a voice brimming with knowledge, clarity and, most delightfully, confidence ... Painter puts muscle and heart into history so that her readers can easily, but thoughtfully, draw the lines between past and present. Her history is inclusive, not in a pandering or self-consciously correct way, but because her artful telling of it is full of complexity that’s both beautiful and bracing.
Richard Thompson Ford
Positive The Washington Post ... [a] thoughtful history of the rules and rituals of attire ... Ford...has a lawyer’s eye for the ways in which legislation and common law have helped shape attitudes about fashion, along with a fan’s sustained curiosity about fashion’s visual language ... Ford makes an elegant argument that because fashion is a living language, it has the capacity to evolve.
Bill Cunningham
Positive The Washington Post The language, full of phrases such as \'stitching up a storm\' and \'a dope like me,\' suggests that it was written in a pre-Internet age, but to the end, Cunningham always sounded like a man whose turns of phrase were firmly rooted in black-and-white Hollywood-ese ... It’s not so much the language that places his memoir in time, but rather its tenor. It’s upbeat and chirpy — free of today’s irony and angst-riddled navel-gazing ... Cunningham’s memoir is, to use one of his favorite words, a marvelous glimpse into the fashion world as New York was coming into its own ... He seems a bit of an unreliable narrator — unreliable because of sheer stubborn cheerfulness ... Cunningham writes with forthright simplicity ... He was profoundly private, and anyone who reaches for his memoir hoping that it will offer insight into his personal life will be disappointed ... Fashion Climbing is a letter from another era. It can be both charming and anachronistic.
Ivanka Trump
Pan The Washington Post Women Who Work is trite and tedious. So focused on exhorting readers to define success on their own terms, it manages to be both humorless and comically removed from the realities of life for the broad swath of women who work 9 to 5 or who struggle along with minimum-wage jobs ... Can a book be poised? If so, this book is an exemplar of poise. It is also more than 200 pages of nonspecific reassurance that everything will be great ... The book’s language is weighed down by business buzzwords, all of which have the effect of draining a sense of humanity from the pages. At times, the book reads like a transcript from The Apprentice ... This book is earnest. But that doesn’t make it particularly thoughtful or impactful. The same might ultimately be said of its author.