I’ve mentioned Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels a few times here; for those who are interested, Jacob Levy has organized a seminar that will be hosting responses to the book from Jacob, Melissa Schwartzberg, Maria, Marin, Andrew Rehfeld, Patrick Dineen, Nadia Urbinati and me (some are up there; others, including Rosenblum’s responses, will be posted over the next day or two). I will also be contributing to an entirely separate seminar on the book at Cato Unbound. Jacob mentions in his introductory post that CT helped pioneer this way of discussing books (nb the word ‘helped;’ doubtless there are others out there who had the same idea) – it’s nice to see that it is beginning to take off among academics more generally. While I don’t think that blogs and similar forms of online publication will ever replace conventional journals, I could see them replacing traditional academic book reviews, given their advantages of speed, dialogic component etc.
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john theibault 01.27.09 at 3:08 pm
I agree that book symposia are a potentially powerful added-value for academic book reviewing—especially in light of the closing-down of book review sections in newspapers mentioned in the previous post. The symposium format will undoubtedly work best for the really “big” books with cross-disciplinary appeal. I don’t see them supplanting the book review sections of flagship disciplinary journals like The American Historical Review, simply because there are so many specialized works that appeal to only a small audience.
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