Sunday, April 25, 2010

Links & Reviews

- Book Patrol reported this week that the FBI has been checking out bookstores in the Northwest (particularly in Vancouver) looking for wanted gangster Whitey Bulger.

- J.L. Bell notes a new Concord Museum exhibit of historical items passed down through generations of Concord families.

- On "Morning Edition" this week, a story about Anna Barbauld, a lab assistant to Joseph Priestley, who penned a poem to Priestly from the perspective a mouse he was set to experiment on the next morning.

- Steve Ferguson has some super-depressing news about the apparent dispersal of an important 19th-century business archive.

- Historian Orlando Figes fessed up this week to posting anonymous, scathing reviews of his rivals' works on Amazon.com. More in the TLS.

- Ken Auletta has an essay in this week's New Yorker on what the iPad might mean for reading and the publishing industry.

- Some more trouble for Stephen Ambrose: appears he made up more than was previously known.

- Paul Collins offers up "the most incoherent book title of 1907." Love it.

Reviews

- Alberto Manguel's A Reader on Reading: short review by Edward King in the Sunday Times.

- James Horn's A Kingdom Strange: review by Greg Schneider in the WaPo.

- Evan Thomas' The War Lovers: review by Ronald Steel in the NYTimes.

- James Shapiro's Contested Will: review by Charles Nicholl in the TLS.

- Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville in America: review by François Furstenberg in Slate.