Here at AuthorScoop, we pull reviews from all over. It’s fun. It’s varied. But Salon.com has a compelling article on why a great literary critic is more than just your average opinion.
Maggie McNabb’s, DECODING DESIGN, gets the thorough treatment from blogger Robert Blinn. And it sounds like an excellent way to tie your brain in a knot and then smooth it out again.
SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH is a YA novelization of American soldiers in Iraq called, reviewed by the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.
The folks at Listanity have posted ‘The 10 Craziest How-To Books You Never Knew Existed’.
From How to Shit in the Woods to How to Read a Book, the selection offers some type of strange hope for just about everyone:
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The best literature, both modern and historic, is a primary form of storing and imparting knowledge, a means of entertainment and pleasure, a source of comfort at times of duress and cause for much deep thinking and soul searching.
However, not all literature is a panacea of cultural, philosophical or artistic enlightenment. Some published books serve no other purpose but to entertain us and take our minds off the daily rigours of life. Want to know how to climb to the highest echelon of the Roman Catholic Church or start your very own church? Maybe you’re sick of your friends and would like to learn how to get rid of them?
Check out the full list (with links to buy!) here.
“When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he’ll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.”
A while back, I found a list of book reviews from fourth-graders. Now here’s a website for teen reviews and I found it a great effort. Check out teenink.com and send your teens, too. Hey, it’s not Brittney Spears!
A whole page of short reviews from LibraryJournal.com to stoke your fiction and nonfiction fires.
If GENERAL LEE’S ARMY: FROM VICTORY TO COLLAPSE is as interesting as its review in The Christian Science Monitor, then I won’t say there are too many Civil War dissections out there.
And they just seem to be coming at me in clusters, like grapes and hopefully not sour. Here’s Booklist Online’s top 10 Sci-Fi/Fantasy.
“There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.”
THE SCANDAL PLAN, a novel by Bill Folman lampoons election American strategy.
Don’t you have to be dead to get the novel treatment? Apparently not. Or somebody better tell Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to lay down quick and let me toss some dirt on their faces.
THE GIFT OF RAIN gets a nod from The New Yorker, which is always better than a poke in the eye.
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us — it’s as simple as asking a teacher “How can I help?” He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School.
“To most readers the word ‘fiction’ is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author’s part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.”
English 4050/5560, otherwise known as “Interstellar Message Composition,” is the first class to enlist creative writers in a potential cosmic conversation. Funded in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Wyoming Space Grant Consortium, it’s designed to fill a practical – if extremely theoretical – need. “We’ve thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven’t thought much about what we’d actually say,” says Lockwood, a professor of natural science and and humanities.
Oh, how much do I want to recommend Os Guinness’ THE CASE FOR CIVILITY to a few certain people? Never too early to start shopping for Christmas…
America has a National Intelligence Council? Oh. Phew. Google tells me it’s a security thing. Good. Its former chairman, Joseph Nye, analyzes the balance of ‘hard’ and ’soft’ power in international policy-making to arrive at the optimal solution in THE POWERS TO LEAD.
The wardrobe of author, Elizabeth Kendall, has written its autobiography. At least that’s what it says on the cover of AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A WARDROBE. What the hell - I’m game.
The folks at 
“When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he’ll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.”
“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.”
“To most readers the word ‘fiction’ is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author’s part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.”
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