About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Gaston Dorren
Positive Shelf Awareness \"The text is enlivened with illustrations and charts and supplemented by sound files on a website. There is a good index. For the most part, this book is not at all technical except for Dorren\'s occasional use of phonetic symbols. A final section offers resources for learning the languages, only one or two in most cases, though many more for the one he struggled to learn for this project--Vietnamese ... This is an engaging and informative whirlwind tour of how major world languages are created, used and changed.\
Susan Gubar
Positive Shelf Awareness Late-Life Love combines criticism with her memoir of the persistent love in her marriage, despite the pains and humiliations of advanced age ... Stories of romantic love in old age from literature and the arts intertwine with a thoughtful memoir of the author\'s resilient marriage.
Nicole Chung
Positive Shelf Awareness Chung creates a suspenseful story with her avalanches of questions and unexpected discoveries, and her hard-won insights into the nature of identity ... this is also an emotional and level-headed book about the rewards of questioning family expectations in order to come to terms with the complicated truth ... a moving memoir.
David Quammen
Rave Shelf Awareness Quammen is an established and skillful science writer, able to convey difficult scientific ideas with the excitement of their discovery. He balances the technical details with vivid anecdotes, humor and casual charm. This is a serious and entertaining book that will fascinate anyone interested in the history and nature of life.
Rania Abouzeid
Rave Shelf Awareness \"Abouzeid carefully disentangles the significance of complex and shifting political, ethnic and religious identities involved, and provides expert historical and political context, maintaining strict objectivity and taking no sides. She explains her criteria for believing a story, and how she came to be deceived in her earlier reporting of certain incidents ... This may be the most intimate and epic account yet for the ongoing tragedy of the Syrian civil war.\
Jonathan Kauffman
Positive Shelf Awareness ...Kaufmann's affectionate history of the U.S. food revolution and how it infiltrated the mainstream ... Kaufmann tells the interconnecting stories of influential groups, farmers, performance artists, food writers and restaurants ... He breaks his story into three eras: the 'prehistory' reaching back into the 19th century; the 'revolutionary era' 1968-1974; and post-Vietnam War, when 'revolution gave way to lifestyle changes' ... Kaufmann explains how the alternative farm-to-table economy failed in many ways but also persists today ... In this entertaining history, a food writer traces the roots of the U.S. health food revolution and tells the stories of those who were there.
Ijeoma Oluo
Rave Shelf Awareness ...a well-organized, well-argued and lively collection of essays that may be read straight through, relied on as a reference and used for group discussions ... Oluo is persuasive, sympathetic and funny. She is also direct... So You Want to Talk About Race combines memoir, history and statistics to illustrate points. Oluo also provides lists of questions to consider alone or with others, and tips to \'increase your chances of conversation success, or at least decrease your chance of conversation disaster\' ... a challenging, sympathetic and beautifully organized how-to manual for anyone who wants to address problems of race and racism in the U.S.
Megan Hunter
Rave Shelf Awareness Most of the characters are nameless sketches, and much is left unexplained, evoking the confusion and constant fear of refugees. The narrator and her baby exist in a small clear eye together at the center of a collapsing world. Hunter writes in condensed, poetic language, with dreamlike alternations between exact perceptions and evocative obscurity. Short bursts of oracular imagery that read like myth or scripture are scattered through the text. This unsettling and beautiful short novel is a vision of how a life can wash out to sea, and then wash back in again, wrecked and transformed.
Oliver Sacks
Rave Shelf Awareness Sacks's love of the natural world as well as the human one is contagious. The breadth of his interests encourages his readers to expand their own horizons. 'I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of cultural meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.' His curiosity and erudition, and his joy in both intellectual and physical life are in full bloom on these pages ... A brilliant, beautiful and funny collection of essays.