About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Richard Ford
Positive The Los Angeles Times ...there is a melancholy cast to these pages, a picture of three people standing just out of reach of one another, alone together, no matter their love. Ford’s portrait of his father is laced with poignancy for a man unable to connect to his son ... In Between Them, he stakes a claim for paying attention, that the most ordinary circumstances sometimes yield the most universal truths.
Marisa Silver
Positive The Los Angeles Times With elemental simplicity — always part of the fun — [Silver] delivers a tale as mysterious as anything the Grimm Brothers might have collected ... what lifts her story above the one dimensionality of most fables is her commitment to emotions of her characters ... she eventually brings together the pieces of this story like glass in a kaleidoscope patterning and coalescing. The effect is mesmerizing.
Louise Erdrich
Rave The Los Angeles Times In the course of 13 novels and numerous short stories, [Erdrich] has laid out one of the most arresting visions of America in one of its most neglected corners, a tableaux on par with Faulkner, a place both perilous and haunted, cursed and blessed. LaRose is no exception...The rewards of LaRose lie in the quick unraveling and the slow reconstruction of these lives to a moment when animosities resolve, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, into clarity and understanding. While the ending may seem formulaic — a gathering of the young and old, the living and the dead — it is a benediction on the searing forces that preceded it. Told with constraint and conviction, the conclusion of LaRose is its own balm, a peace not easily won but won nonetheless.
Geoffrey Cowan
Positive The Los Angeles Times No musty account of top-coated and mustachioed politicians, Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary is a lively, relevant primer in the sausage-making of candidate selection ... Few historians have given this shameful chapter in the Progressive Party the attention that it deserves, and Cowan’s documentation, drawn mostly from newspaper accounts from the summer of 1912, is compelling. He presents the facts with an even-handedness that is all the more damning for its absence of judgement or indignation.