Some observations on "Issues of Economic Development: the Sub-Saharan African Countries" with a view to designing comparative research on related issues

This is a piece by Boston University professor Ann Seidman, reviewing a book on Sub-Saharan African development and expanding upon its themes

Children's librarians, reviews, and collection development

In the 1990s, libraries are beginning to face the new demands of demographic and technological change. In this evolving context, a discussion of book reviewing and collection development can begin by examining the contemporary role of children's collections and of children's librarians in collection development.published or submitted for publicatio

Book Note: Reviewing Tortured Confessions

Review Extract: Tortured Confessions presents an innovative perspective on the relationship between torture and propaganda. While much has been written about the way propaganda spurs and sanctifies torture by demonizing the enemy, few have explored the way torture itself is used to create propaganda. Abrahamian\u27s work explores how the primary purpose of torture in Iran has been to extract ideological recantations from prisoners

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and certain kinds of children’s literature, calling it lowbrow. Book bloggers, though, demonstrate that such genre fiction is much more than escapist, mixing enjoyment with the literary. In addition, book blogs create space for women who have been systematically excluded from reviewing. The primary way that they do this is by subverting the male gendered language and structure of reviews

A Corrupt Medium: Stephen Burroughs and the Bridgehampton, New York, Library

In his eighteenth-century Memoirs, criminal Stephen Burroughs tells of his campaign to establish a library in Bridgehampton, New York. When the town elders discover the plan, they insist upon reviewing Burroughs's choices. Undercurrents of other debates spill over into what would otherwise merely be some quibbling over book selections. In a series of vividly recounted public meetings, Burroughs pits the local elders against himself and "the People." These book wars are clearly situated in ideological struggles regarding rationalism and the role of reading in general; but, more significantly, they are situated in a representational context that by its very genre—that of the rogue narrative—calls into question the role of individual interpretation and literary influence

Author interview: Q and A with Dr Phillipa K. Chong on inside the critics’ circle: book reviewing in uncertain times

In this author interview, we speak to Dr Phillipa K. Chong about her recent book, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times, which takes readers behind the scenes of fiction reviewing, drawing on interviews with critics to explore the complexities of the review-writing process within a broader context of uncertainty

Writing a book review

Book reviews are a good way to get started with writing for a journal and this Learning and CPD activity takes you through the process of understanding the aims of book review, undertaking practice pieces through to reviewing a book and advice on the dos and don'ts of book reviewing.N/

Lieb-Robinson bounds and the simulation of time evolution of local observables in lattice systems

This is an introductory text reviewing Lieb-Robinson bounds for open and closed quantum many-body systems. We introduce the Heisenberg picture for time-dependent local Liouvillians and state a Lieb-Robinson bound that gives rise to a maximum speed of propagation of correlations in many body systems of locally interacting spins and fermions. Finally, we discuss a number of important consequences concerning the simulation of time evolution and properties of ground states and stationary states.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; book chapte