I’ve been away for Thanksgiving. I hope everyone enjoyed time spent with family and friends. Here is nice holiday story that is book-related, from the Washington Post. “While bartending at Dougherty’s Pub seven years ago,” writes reporter Emily Messner, “Russell Wattenberg overheard teachers at Friday […]

Is this a move to compete with what Amazon has done? Google is beta-testing a Google Print site. Here’s what they say about the new service. “Google Print enables publishers to promote their books on Google. Google scans the full text of participating publishers’ titles […]

“Human beings expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment — music, dancing, and static visual arts,” writes scholar Denis Dutton, a professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. “Of all of the arts, however, it is the […]

Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the very popular book The Tipping Point, has a new book coming out in January: Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking. Here’s what he has to say about the new book. “It’s a […]

Roy Disney has gotten into the luxury magazine business. According to this story in the New York Times, Disney and the family’s private investment firm Shamrock Capital Growth Fund have invested $50 million into Modern Luxury Media, publishers of such high-end magazines as Chicago Social […]

“I wonder whether I am afflicted with something more than a “gentle madness,” as Nicholas A. Basbanes described it in his 1999 book on the history of book collecting,” writes this annonymous English professor from a Midwestern liberal arts college. “You see, I spend more […]

This quote is from an older issue of the New York Review of Books, but it says a lot not only about the nature of the current administration, but also hints at the nature of our media and how it shapes our views. In many […]

I just learned of some sad news today. Noted author Iris Chang is dead. Chang was the author of the acclaimed book, The Rape of Nanking, which chronicled the often forgotten and brutle massacre of nearly 300,000 Chinese civilians during World War II at the […]

This is probably the first of several such lists, but Benjamin Schwarz lists his “books of the year” in the December issue of The Atlantic. A book of the year “is one from which you should be able to derive pleasure and profit a decade […]