Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Back in December, in Booklist‘s Spotlight on Sci-Tech, we featured Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life  of Henrietta Lacks, a powerful chronicle of the life of the woman who, unbeknownst to her, gave the world  HeLa cells, the first “immortal” human cells grown in a lab, cells that have made countless medical advances possible for the last five [...]

It’s one thing when a first-time author self-publishes a book — it can be a great way to get noticed, as we learned from David Carnoy. It’s another thing entirely when a well known and widely respected author turns from traditional publishing to self-publishing. But that’s exactly what John Edgar Wideman (Fanon, 2008) is doing. [...]

Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back, a grim reexamination of the first wartime use of the atomic bomb, relies extensively on first-person accounts. Unfortunately, according to the New York Times (“Doubts Raised on Book’s Tale of Atom Bomb,” by William J. Broad), one section of the book relies on the [...]

While agents and authors cheer Macmillan’s stand against Amazon, some e-book aficionados are angry at authors. In an anecdote-rich but fact-impoverished article in the New York Times, Motoko Rich and Brad Stone quote a bunch of people who are willing to pay a few hundred books for a gizmo — but balk at a few [...]

Editor’s note: Connie Fletcher has been reviewing mysteries for Booklist for more than 30 years, including many titles by Dick Francis. The day before Dick Francis died, I was in my local bookstore, The Book Stall in Winnetka, Illinois,  and was stopped in my browsing tracks by a tiny display someone had taped to a [...]

Messages began to accumulate like snow online over the weekend as the chilling news of poet Lucille Clifton’s death began to travel from one poetry lover to another. I feel bereft as so many others do because Clifton was the sort of poet who spoke to everyone about everything that matters with unfailing clarity, conviction, and [...]

All right, I’ve kind of been tuning out all the media hype around the new Dante’s Inferno video game — maybe I’m worn out from thinking of new titles for Quirk Classics, or maybe it just seems like the classic lit/video game jokes write themselves. (I love NPR’s observation that “some Dante scholars bristle at the [...]

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is surprised to learn that McSweeney’s had a real-life namesake: Timothy McSweeney died on January 24 at the age of 67. On the McSweeney’s website you can find a message from his family as well as Dave Eggers’ short, touching essay: Knowing that the journal bore the name of [...]

Jenny Sanford has been making the rounds hawking her book, Staying True. Her visit to The Daily Show last night can be described in one word — awkward! Jon Stewart, for once, seemed at a loss for words (although he did notice, as I pointed out in my review, Sanford is adept at complimenting her [...]

J. D. Salinger has died. The writer who lived so privately has, in death, once again become the subject of the kind of intense public scrutiny that infuriated him. After the reflections of our own Daniel Kraus,  the pieces I enjoyed the most were sort of quirky, personal views: Joanna Smith Rakoff’s memories of working for Salinger’s [...]