About Book Marks
Tanya Gold
Recent Reviews
Britney Spears
Positive The Evening Standard (UK) It reads like a Tennessee Williams play ... Spears isn’t interesting, but what happened to her is.
Matthew Dennison
Rave The Telegraph (UK) \"A sadness pervades this book: despair. Dahl had pockets of tenderness — he gave the fee from one magazine piece to an airman’s widow, and he tried to answer all the letters he received from children – but I think this book is a portrait of depression, which is buried rage ... This book is riveting, and immaculately written. What it lacks – probably because Dahl himself did – is a vivid inner life: it is as if he gave it all to the novels. There is something shrouded about Dennison’s account, something unspoken ... Reading Dennison’s account, all I can feel is pity, for a man so raging, and a boy so lost.\
John Boyne
Pan The Telegraph (UK) [The Boy in the Striped Pajamas] is a skilful novel on its own very narrow terms, if you know nothing about the Holocaust, and if you wish to know nothing, and that is the danger of All the Broken Places too. The emphasis: what is not said, and who does not say it. Making art about the Holocaust is morally fraught, as the artist has an obligation both to memorialise and to teach. That is what the subject demands, if you want to be seemly. If you want to be unseemly, please yourself ... The sequel has Boyne’s skill and immorality: but this time, less of the first, and more of the second ... I don’t doubt there is a valuable novel to be written about Nazi children, but Boyne does not choose this path. He lingers for a while, but then transforms his novel, instead, into what feels like a police procedural: a thriller ... The parallel narratives – one promising, one insulting – combine into a pulpy denouement that shames the author and the reader both.
John Boyne
Pan The Jewish Chronicle f you haven’t read it — and you shouldn’t — it tells the story of Bruno, the son of a nameless Auschwitz commandant, who befriends Shmuel, a Jewish boy interned in the camp ... Historians might cry ... [Boyne] does not appear to understand why Jews do not thank him for writing a series of books about the Holocaust that are arguably not about Jews at all, but about Nazis and their potential for redemption.
Tina Fey
Pan The Telegraph (UK) ...an evasive memoir starring an absent Tina Fey; it reads like a sketch show, obviously. I’m not actually sure Fey wanted to write it. I think someone stuck a gun made of dollars at her and made her write it ... \'I have a uniquely German capacity to vacillate between sentimentality and coldness,\' she murmurs, but of the real Tina Fey, that is all you get ... Fey has two problems in Bossypants. First, she doesn’t want to tell us anything and keeps telling us she doesn’t want to tell us anything – hear this enough, and you will want to stop listening. It leaks out anyway...but always with a gag on top, which works in comedy, because that is what comedy is for, self-protection, but not in memoir. I’m Tina Fey! Back off! If you come closer, I’ll hit you in the face with a joke! Everything in Tina Fey land is in the service of the punchline. This works in comedy; in narrative it sounds like a woman tied to a chair with a pen superglued to her finger, sobbing ... The second problem is that Fey obviously thinks celebrities are ridiculous. Of course she does, she’s smart...But she’s one of Them now ... And that is Bossypants – the book where Tina Fey fell down a hole, papered with $5 million. She made a mistake that no comic should make, particularly the most famous female comic in the world. She didn’t get angry – or truthful – enough.