Category: reviewing

Bryant & May: Peculiar London

A most peculiar book about a most peculiar town

Scientific Historica: How the World’s Great Science Books Chart the History of Knowledge, by Brian Clegg

What is wonderful about this book is its visual content, and for that it is highly recommended.

The Golden Ratio: The Divine Beauty of Mathematics, by Gary D. Meisner

Although I remain largely unpersuaded by Meisner’s survey of the golden ratio in artworks, his book is well produced and rich with images.

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the New Millennium

An old book review, recently unearthed.

Ten thoughts on Carl Hiaasen’s Razor Girl

I read Carl Hiassen’s Razor Girl after seeing several rave reviews, such as two in the New York Times (“irresistible”  and “elegant”), one from NPR (“hilarious”), and one…

ROI review

A nice short review of River of Ink in my local paper: “River of Ink: Literature, History, Art” by Thomas Christensen (Counterpoint Press, $35, 320 pages). The title…

The 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

The NBCC has announced their 2010 award finalists. I used to be a member of this group but there are too many older books I need to read…

The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

Right Reading received this e-mail from Olivia Sears, president of the Center for the Art of Translation. I hope you are all enjoying The Best of Contemporary Mexican…

Why book review sections don’t work

Who would have guessed that the San Francico Chronicle‘s Sunday book review would be one of the few standalone newspaper reviews remaining? (It survives as a pull-out from…

Publishing payola

Want to bribe the New York Times Book Review into reviewing your book? If so, you’ll have to come up with something better than these examples of book…

Thinking with Type

Continuing our week of laziness link love while I’m on the road, I Love Typography has a review of Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. I think you…

Weinberger on Sontag

Susan Sontag has positive associations for me for a personal and I suppose fairly trivial reason — she sent a generous letter to me when I was director…

Poisoning the Well

What we get in newspaper book reviews are critics testifying to what their first encounters with a work were like, before any other people have experienced the work….

Faint Praise

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, by Gail Pool. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2007. 184 pages, 6 x 9 in., bibligraphy, index, $19.95…

Should reviewers read other reviews?

Discussion at the Reading Experience.

The most pompous translator of our time?

When I saw that the anchor text for a link on Ron Silliman’s blog was “a review of the most pompous translator of our time” I had a…

Book Reviews in Blogs and Newspapers

Joe Wilkert makes some good points about book reviewing on his Publishing 2020 blog. Why do so many people like reading the reviews of books on Amazon.com? I…

How many book reviews do we need?

Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion of the role of newspaper book reviews. Several people say they just want “the bottom line — buy it, read it, skip…

Another Book Review Folding

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the L.A. Times will cease to publish its book review as a separate section. That would mean that the only stand-alone…