May 6, 2010

A Little Light Reading

End of exam grading (or maybe just lazy mid-spring reading): from Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, musings on the story of a man who never was, via a review of a new book on the subject, Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat; buckle that swash! with Allan Massie, as he considers the real value of historical fiction in a piece for Standpoint. Survey the battle between print and ebook with Ken Auletta (again for the New Yorker)--do we value electronic less than paper? I wonder if that's the mindset that creates so much piracy (ah! back to swashbuckling). Then check out a new evaluation of the young Alexis de Tocqueville's discovery of a young United States--a review of Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville's Discovery of America by Sean Wilentz for The American Prospect.

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