[Breaks radio silence]
I've emerged, after just about two full days of writing. The full thesis draft and appendices are all done, and I'm pretty (okay, really) sick of looking at the computer so as soon as I'm finished with this post I'm going to go sit and read for a while.
- Travis comments on the Rebecca Streeter-Chen sentence: "... [L]leaving this serious crime in the hands of Rockland County was clearly a mistake. Unless absolutely forced into it by statute, there seems to be a pathetic unwillingness on the part of the judiciary to take these crimes seriously. Does anyone think that if she stole $60,000 dollars in cash from the historical society she’d have gotten probation?"
- The NYPost reports today on a recent fairly imaginative marriage proposal at New York's Strand Bookstore.
- John Overholt announced the opening of a new exhibit at the Houghton Library, "Edward Gibbon: The Luminous Historian." That runs through 22 December, which means I've still got some time to get out there and see it. John's included a few highlights in his post.
- Over at Reading Archives, Richard Cox has comments on two recent books, Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies (here) and Putting ‘America’ on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States (here).
- Tim points out a scholarly take on LibraryThing tagging, Tiffany Smith's Cataloging and You: Measuring the Efficacy of a Folksonomy for Subject Analysis [doc]. Also on the LT front this week, Tim fired a book-site-war-broadside with a blistering compilation of blog-posts excoriating Shelfari for its nasty spamming campaign.
- Over at Paper Cuts, Dwight Garners features Bizarre Books, an anthology of books with unlikely titles. Very amusing.
- Texas A&M University has acquired a copy of George Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio (1844), in honor of alumnus Dr. Mavis Kelsey.
- BibliOdyssey's got some natural history and maritime illustrations from the diary of Carl Johan Gethe, a cartographer for the Swedish East India Company (1746-1749).
Reviews
- For the NYTimes, Richard Brookhiser reviews Christopher Hitchens' Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man': A Biography.
- Also in the Times, Jon Meacham examines Joe Ellis' American Creation. Ellis was on NPR this week to discuss the new book; you can listen here.
- Over in the Philly Inq, Steve Weinberg reviews Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship.
