Free Range Librarian

I read David Vann’s A Mile Down early one Saturday morning when I thought I was going back to sleep but didn’t, in one luxurious unstoppable four-hour marathon that meant the cats sulked in the living room because I didn’t top off their food bowls and I was late to some meeting I had sworn [...]

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(Note: this review is based on an advance reader’s edition provided by the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Per the publisher’s request, I do not quote directly from the uncorrected proof.)
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be math geeks. That is at least part of the message from Gifted, an ambitiously-crafted, [...]

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Today is Tax Day in Tallahassee. Well, it’s Tax Day for me in my house, because I filed an extension (as I always do; it’s legal, I always have a good reason, and I do pay what I owe) and got my tax stuff halfway done and then got into the “hustle and flow” mode [...]

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“… if newspapers are dying, then blogs are the maggots come to feast upon their corpses.”
Like many biblioholics, I always fall–sometimes literally–for a good book review. I tripped on the treadmill last week laughing over Anthony Gottlieb’s review of God is Not Great, a review which not only seduced me into thinking about reading the [...]

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So a few days ago I’m somewhere, not around librarians, and I mention that I really like what Oprah has done for reading, and a couple of people say, but her choices are terrible. So I decided to test that hypothesis, and concluded that I wouldn’t mind being as bad a writer as half the [...]

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(Updated 1/05) As a sometime adjunct instructor at a couple of library schools, if I were teaching right now, I’d find a way to work “We the Media” into my syllabus, regardless of the class. For anyone remotely webby, “We the Media” is required reading.
“We the Media,” by respected Silicon Valley journalist (now citizen-journalism [...]

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Dan Gillmor: We the Media
Tara Calishain: Web Search Garage: The Definitive Guide on How to Best Search the Internet
Both books have already passed the flipper test: I flip through the book, and if I have to keep flipping for at least three minutes, it’s got great potential. Serendipitously, both books are also by people I [...]

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