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”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/search/label/Rosenblum-symposium 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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