—————————
I have been doing book reviews for newspapers and magazines since the early 1980s. Of book reviewing as an occupation, I have said all I have to say in a Straggler column. The pages linked to here contain all my surviving book reviews, with an occasional movie and opera review for good measure.
As a rough organizing principle for these reviews, I have grouped them into the categories shown in the navigation box, and described below. The categories overlap, so that some of the categorization is arbitrary. Should a novel about China go under "China" or "Fiction"? Answer: It's fiction. I don't do half as much fiction reviewing as I'd like to, so I have taken every opportunity to fill out the "Fiction" category. All the overlap cases are resolved like that—by whim.
—————————
The categories:
- Math—Nonfiction books about mathematics and physical or computer science
- China—Books about Chinese history, culture, politics, and literature.
- Human sciences—The definition here is wide, from genetics to "Consciousness Studies."
- Political Science—Similarly wide, including history and statecraft.
- Philosophy and religion.
- Fiction.
- Considerations—These are pieces, usually long, in which I discuss a writer, or some aspect of literature, "in the round."
- Miscellaneous—Reviews of books that don't fall clearly into any of the above categories.