Wednesday's Notes
For the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, the Guardian offers its quiz about which books the censors feared you would read.
Congratulations to the University of Washington's Stephanie Smallwood, whose Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora has won the Frederick Douglass Prize for 2008. It is awarded by Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Anthony E. Kaye's Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South, Kristin Mann's Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900, and Chandra Manning's What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War were other finalists for the prize.
Jonathan Bate reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science for the Telegraph, 26 September.
From Hans Ohanian's Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, Discover identifies the 23 biggest ones. Andrew Robinson's review of the book for New Scientist points out that Ohanian made some mistakes of his own.
Mark Greif,"The Corrupter of Youth," TAP, 19 September, reviews Neil Gross's Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher.
Finally, yet another casualty to the financial markets: farewell to the New York Sun. Whatever you may have thought about its politics, week in and week out the Sun was among the very best places in the American press for excellent coverage of the arts and literature. I will miss it.