Trusted Eye: Post–World War II Adventures of a Fearless Art Advocate by Claudia Fontaine Chidester
"A fascinating book, rich in archivalia, anecdotes, and insight, Trusted Eye documents the life and career of Virginia Fontaine (née Hammersmith, 1915–91), "one of the most important promotors of art among the members of the American occupation forces" in immediate post–World War II Germany (181)."
Reviewed by Peter Chametzky
Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith
"Jacob Smith's Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves is an accessible work about an esoteric topic: the "aerosphere" as a contact point between birds and radio broadcasts."
Reviewed by Nick Earhart
Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork by Whitney Trettien
"With the rapid development of book history as a discipline, recent work has focused on breaking down the book's elements, forms, genres, and agents into discrete units for close study, zooming in on title pages, frontispieces, and indexes, for example, or singling out exceptional publishers, illustrators, and binders."
Reviewed by Nora Epstein
Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America by Reed Gochberg
"In Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Reed Gochberg offers an engaging analysis of informational institutions during a period of change across the nineteenth century."
Reviewed by Emma Hetrick
Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World by Rob Kitchin
"As we become more swaddled by data in our everyday lives, it becomes almost impossible to fully comprehend data's impact and potential outcomes in the future. In Data Lives, Rob Kitchin takes a novel approach to examine a complex topic that is data."
Reviewed by Barbara Lazarotto
Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan
"More often than not, today's book indexes are afterthoughts. Typeset at the last second lest the pagination shift, squeezed into narrow columns, and tucked into the back of the book, the index is an unassuming, if obligatory, part of your average nonfiction text."
Reviewed by Katy Nelson
A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig
"What does it mean for the marginalized and the persecuted to control their data and thus shape their destiny? In A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture, Jason Lustig explores this very twenty-first-century question through the lens of the history of twentieth-century Jewish archives."
Reviewed by Aliza Spicehandler