The Giant's Shoulders #42, the history of science carnival, is up at PACHSmörgåsbord.

Sean Carroll, "Unwinding Time," WSJ, 17 December, reviews Allen Everett's and Thomas Roman's Time Travel and Warp Drives and Brian Clegg's How to Build a Time Machine.

Anne Fadiman, "The Oakling and the Oak," Lapham's Quarterly, 18 December, considers fathers and sons in the example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son, David Hartley Coleridge.

Joyce Appleby reviews David O. Stewart's American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson's America for the Washington Post, 16 December.

Allan Kozinn, "Don't Scowl, Beethoven, You're Loved," NYT, 18 December, reviews Michael Broyles's Beethoven in America.

In the spirit of Jacquelyn Hall's "long history of the civil rights movement," Tomiko Brown-Nagin's "When Does the War End? Or, the Long History of the Civil War," Legal History, 15 December, responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" Atlantic, ca 7 December, by challenging a foreshortened notion of Civil War history.

Michael Dirda reviews Laird M. Easton, ed., Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler for the Barnes & Noble Review, 16 December.

John Adams, "Hedy Lamarr's World War II Adventure," NYT, 16 December, and Rachel Shteir, "Frequency Hopping," The Book, 19 December, review Richard Rhodes's Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Louis Bayard reviews Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark for the Washington Post, 16 December.

Finally, Timothy Garton Ash, Julian Barnes, Russell Jacoby, Scott McLemee, Ron Radosh, Corey Robin, Simon Schama and George Scialabba bid farewell to Christopher Hitchens. See also: Hitchens, "Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History" (1998).