paper trail

Dec 28, 2010 @ 9:00:00 am

Denis Dutton

The third-generation Kindle has become Amazon.com’s bestselling product of all time, edging out the humble print version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is touting the Kindle as the ultimate reading machine, saying of competitors such as the iPad: "Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies and web browsing, and their Kindles for reading sessions."

Christopher Hitchens denounces his old nemesis Henry Kissinger (and his apologists) in Hitchens’s new column for Slate, “Mr. Kissinger, Have You No Shame?”

2011 will mark the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and there will surely be a flood of books published on the subject. We’ve seen an early copy of the Library of America’s The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It, a collection of first person narrative accounts, and we think it will be among the best of the new year. At Salon, Civil War historian Glenn W. LaFantasie picks his “Top 12 Civil War Books Ever Written.”

Jacket Copy offers “Five Literary Treats to Last All Year Long,” a collection of their favorite bookish websites, apps, and other delights, which have quickly become our favorites as well.