Thursday's Notes

The finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced. In nonfiction, they are: Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, John W. Dower's Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq, Patti Smith's Just Kids, Justin Spring's Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, and Megan K. Stack's Every Man in this Village Is a Liar: An Education in War.

Thaddeus Russell gives us a foretaste of his new book, A Renegade History of the United States, in"11 Freedoms That Drunks, Slackers, Prostitutes and Pirates Pioneered And The Founding Fathers Opposed," Huffington Post, 13 October.

Rachel Shteir,"The Call to Service," The Book, 13 October, reviews Yoko Kawaguchi's Butterfly's Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture.

Jennifer Homans,"Is Ballet Over?" TNR, 13 October, is an excerpt from the epilogue of her new book Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet.

Finally, farewell to La Trobe's and William and Mary's Rhys Isaac, a distinguished historian of colonial America.