Sunday, March 2, 2008

Wiki-loving & more in the Book Reviews

Nicholson Baker's New York Review of Books essay, The Charms of Wikipedia, is ostensibly a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton (Pogue Press/O'Reilly). But instead it is an entertaining account of his own journey-to-the-center-of-the Wiki-earth.

Eric Arnesan has a round-up of newer and older works in African American history in the Chicago Tribune, including Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 by Beth Tompkins Bates (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950, Charles M. Payne and Adam Green, eds. (New York University Press, 2003).

1968 is the topic of Sway, a new novel by Zachary Lazar (Little, Brown), reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Dan DeLuca. He finds that "the great accomplishment of Sway is to take figures of '60s myth and turn them into compelling, believably human - if often abrasive - characters that live and breathe on the page."