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The Nation has a review of Liberty and the News by Walter Lippmann. It (the book!) was written in 1920, but it sounds like it has a lot to say for today.
“There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”

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At long last, Kage Baker’s Company novels are brought to resolution in The Sons of Heaven. Threads of story from throughout the series are picked up. I loved having not only Botanist Mendoza’s story finished, but also those of Preserver Joseph and Literature Preservationist Lewis.
Great as the pleasure of the book was, it was touched [...]

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While in Portland for the UUA’s General Assembly, I of course went shopping at Powell’s City of Books. I’ve been there once before, and what a treat it is. (They also do mail-order of new and used books.) Among the books I bought was a Dover reprint of Karl Mortensen’s 1912 A Handbook of Norse [...]

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Tobias S. Buckell’s debut novel, Crystal Rain, ties together elements of steampunk, hard sf, and fantasy (or religion), all with a distinctive Caribbean flavor.
Set in the far future on another planet, the humans of Crystal Rain have been reduced to non-electronic technology. Flight is possible by blimp, but uncommon. There are a few train lines [...]

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Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discovered a blog written by board members of the National Book Critics Circle. They have a guest post: Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape Today. I like some of the points he makes, and I too lament the falling-away of book reviews in major newspapers. I can’t help thinking [...]

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I’d love to quote the conclusion of Nancy’s Apology: Harry Potter and the Eerie Silence, but that just wouldn’t be cool. It’s longish for a blog post, and worth every moment spent.
I don’t think it was the pagan or magic aspects of the Potter books that drove the conservatives nutty: I think it was the [...]

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No, not trollop! I’m reading Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, in a very nice 1950 hardbound pocket edition from The World’s Classics, published by Oxford University Press. The binding is 3/4 red cloth with gold fleur-de-lys, with a cream spine and red title inset on the spine. And there’s a little ribbon bookmark. I have [...]

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I’ve been reading again, and I have some catching up to do with titles I’ve already finished.
First up: Mainspring by Jay Lake. This is in a strange, small category. It’s kind of Steampunk, but it’s also theology or fantasy. The closest thing to it I’ve read before are J. Gregory Keyes’s alchemical Ben Franklin and [...]

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As an editor who receives many unsolicited books for review, I sometimes dream of writing a book review like this one from the New York Times: An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.
On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”
And you would be spectacularly wrong.

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The Columbia Journalism review has an article about recent books that look at modern food production:
Organic food presently accounts for only 2.5 percent of all food sold in the United States–and that counts all the “industrial organic” food Pollan scorns. Are, then, these debates about the ethics and politics of food largely a pastime of [...]

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