The cover story of the new Texas Monthly cites 35 Texans who “will shape the future” — beginning with Lance Armstrong. Quite a claim — the kind of claim magazines often make to get attention (what are we gonna do if they’re wrong? Cancel our subscription in 20 years?).
But the good news is that among [...]

In the February/March issue, the late, great Texas writer, Donald Barthelme receives an excellent appreciation by James Wolcott (whom I often find irritatingly self-important, but when he’s on a roll, he can do some fine horn-tooting). The hallowed occasion: All of Don B’s short works finally seem to be in print.
Also in Bookforum, [...]

National Geographic has put up nine terrific little video shorts on the Treasure Wars — covering the tangled range of ownership claims among governments, private owners, museums and dealers for such artifacts as the Elgin Marbles, stolen Nazi artworks and Russia’s missing Amber Room.
The print origins of Sweeney Todd — which just toured to [...]

In an earlier post, Yolette Garcia expressed her legitimate concerns about the supposed decline in reading. I’ve previously posted that I think some of the National Endowment for the Arts’ concerns have been overblown because their studies actually measured only a particular sort of reading (they didn’t include reading histories, biographies or science studies, for [...]

I just finished reading a fascinating book, Warren Leslie’s Dallas: Public and Private. Leslie, a public relations man in Dallas for two decades who went on to coordinate PR efforts for cosmetics firms Max Factor and Revlon, wrote the book in 1964 as something of a catharsis after the Kennedy assassination.
In Dallas: Public and [...]

The following review by KERA critic-at-large Jerome Weeks appeared on today’s Morning Edition on KERA 90.1:
For book lovers who are fascinated by the intricacies of gold leaf and vellum as well as the modern forensic techniques that allow experts to restore these precious manuscripts, Geraldine Brooks’ new novel, People of the Book, is like CSI: […]

Announced Saturday night in San Francisco, the NBCC nominees this year were unusual in that Joyce Carole Oates was cited in two categories, fiction and autobiography (the latter category was itself a recent addition). The winners will be announced March 8 in New York City.
Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its [...]

The Guardian picks the World’s 10 Best Bookshops. They’re really the world’s most beautiful or splendiferous bookstores, as witness the amazing El Ataneo bookstore in Buenos Aires (a former theater). The only American bookseller included is the Secret Headquarters comic book store in L.A. It must be quite the place because a) its website [...]

The cultural elite — the one that supposedly deems anything less than opera to be so much pop junk — does not exist, say British researchers. Call them cultural “omnivores,” instead. Not quite as satisfying an insult, though.
Ana Kothe in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture makes a case for Jon Stewart as [...]

I had never heard of George MacDonald Fraser before Jerome’s post. But the Flashman  novels play a small role in Charlie Wilson’s War, which I just finished reading last night. 
For those unfamiliar with the book/movie: While representing East Texas in Congress – and partying and junketing non-stop -Wilson and key partners whipped up the largest covert operation in US history, supporting the mujahideen [...]