The Campaign for the American Reader blog has been conducting an interesting experiment over the last few months. Marshal Zeringue, executive director of the project, has been asking authors from various fields to apply the page 69 test to their most recent book. Today’s entry, from William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden, was the 100th of these tests thus applied for the blog. Authors who’ve tested their books have included Danielle Trussoni (Falling […]

Though former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has written 23 books, none has stirred interest and ire as sharply as his latest, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster). In the latest issue of Newsweek, Eleanor Clift spoke with Carter about the firestorm the book has ignited. Clift writes that Carter’s book “has drawn fire for its use of the word ‘apartheid,’ and a former associate, Kenneth Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory […]

Watching television this holiday season has been mildly frightening. Maybe I’ve never noticed it before — maybe you’ll tell me this isn’t new — but the message I saw pushed in my face over the holidays this year and the one that has been picking up in tempo as the key gift days approach is this: if you want to make someone happy, you need to buy the right present. More: to make them really […]

In 2007, January Magazine enters its 10th year of continuous publication. That’s a deliciously long time to have been doing anything, let alone reading and thinking about and writing about books and authors. We have accomplished so much of what we set out to do in 1997. (1997!) In some ways, even more. In many ways it feels as though we at January Magazine evolved the format that has become associated with blogging. A decade […]