Sunday, June 29, 2008

Links & Reviews

I'm saving the Charlottesville Report for tomorrow so that I can empty out my overflowing Google Reader tonight.

- Wordle is pretty cool. Here's a visualization of the entire text of my thesis (in Union colors, naturally) [via Liminal Librarian (the site, not my thesis)].

- Michael Lieberman posts an open letter from Iraqi National Librarian Saad Eskander regarding the 7-million-document archive from the Baath Party headquarters "removed" from Iraq during the invasion and how held by the Iraqi Memory Foundation at Stanford's Hoover Institute. Eskander's been calling for the return of these documents for years (here's my writeup of a talk he gave in Boston last November), and has been joined in that call by the American and Canadian archival communities, among others. Of course the materials should be returned.

- The good folks at Rare Book Review note that The Times has digitized its issues from 1785-1985 and made them freely available and searchable online. Lovely!

- Joyce offers up a fun poem about book formats.

- Travis comments on what's next in the Brubaker case (answer: pre-sentence reports).

- From BibliOdyssey, detailed engravings of a beached whale.

- Gary Dexter discusses how Swift's Tale of a Tub got its name, over at The Telegraph.

- Paul Collins has some Frankenstein finds, which reminds me that I got to see the Frankenstein exhibit in the UVa Rotunda while I was down there, and recommend it highly.

Reviews

- Taryn Plumb reviews Emerson Baker's The Devil of Great Island in the Boston Globe (my review here).

- For The Telegraph, Kate Colquhoun reviews The Phoenix: St Paul's Cathedral and the Men who Made Modern London by Leo Hollis.

- Also from The Telegraph, Clive Aslet reviews Michael Boulter's Darwin's Garden: Down House and The Origin of Species.

- And Malcolm Gaskill reviews A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz (my review here).

- David Waldstreicher reviews two new works in the Boston Globe today: Nancy Rubin Stuart's The Muse of the Revolution about Mercy Otis Warren, and Kevin Hayes' The Road to Monticello, a new biblio-biography of Jefferson.