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

Summer is the season for exploration and discovery, and readers of all ages, interests, and tastes would love to visit the American Writers Museum—if only such a place existed. Although we have national museums celebrating the luminaries of baseball, rock and roll, the visual arts, various ethnic traditions, and science and technology, to categorize but [...]

It’s been 20 years since Anita Hill had the temerity to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. It took a lot of nerve for her to come forth with allegations of sexual harassment against a man who was lined up to be the second African American male to serve on the Supreme [...]

Nearly a year ago, I was in a public library for a class on online research tools, searching a site for biographies. On a whim I typed in the name George Edwin Taylor. I happened to have the galley of the book, For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, [...]

In reviewing Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, I made my first foray into the world of e-books. First times are never all that pleasurable, are they? Getting the book online was a no-brainer. Obama’s Wars was embargoed and it would be faster to get it Monday morning first thing than wait for the stores to [...]

The term third world is generally applied to underdeveloped nations, which unfortunately are mostly populated by people with brown skin. So even though Arianna Huffington’s book Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream is about the US economy in general, some readers might not be able [...]

The recession may be over (did you notice?), but the man in the White House is still taking it on the chin–and not just from FOX News, either. Some of the latest criticism comes from liberals. In The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, Roger Hodge compares Obama’s lofty rhetoric with the [...]

If I hadn’t read Will Bunch’s The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, I might have been more mystified by several recent developments. Monday, NBC’s Brian Williams, in an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama, asked for a response to charges that the president is not a native-born [...]

Comingsoon.net reports that Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing J. Edgar Hoover in an upcoming biographical movie directed by Clint Eastwood. DiCaprio won’t be the first actor to play the controversial FBI director on the big screen — in fact, by rough count, he’ll be the 1,897th. Give or take. But I think he’ll do an [...]

April 9 marks the 34th anniversary of the release of All the President’s Men, the movie based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1974 book of the same name, and that seems like a good enough reason to hype the book a little. Woodward and Bernstein were, of course, the Washington Post reporters who broke [...]

While in a public library this week, I saw a representative of the US Census Bureau manning a desk set up as a questionnaire assistance center to make sure everyone had received and returned the census form and to answer any questions. The neighborhood was one with a very racially and ethnically mixed population. I [...]