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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.
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The categories:
- Math — Nonfiction books about mathematics and the physical or information sciences.
- China — Books about Chinese (or other Far Eastern) history, culture, politics, and literature.
- History — Books about history, other than Far Eastern history, and including biographies of historical figures.
- Human sciences — The definition here is wide, from genetics to "Consciousness Studies."
- Political Science — Statecraft, government, nations, elections (where not covered under "History").
- 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.