Adam Kirsch,"The Secret of The Canterbury Tales," Slate, 29 December, reviews Burton Raffel's new translation of Chaucer from middle to modern English.

Joseph Tartakovsky,"A Man of Imagination," New Criterion, December, reviews Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli.

David Schiff,"Ives's Ears," The Nation, 17 December, reviews Gayle Sherwood Magee's Charles Ives Reconsidered. Hat tip.

Bijan C. Bayne reviews James Sullivan's The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved The Soul of America for The Root, 26 December.

Pan Tianshu,"‘Working Sisters': The everyday lives of migrant women in China's world factories," Harvard Magazine, January/February, reviews Leslie T. Chang's Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.

Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum,"Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House," Vanity Fair, February, includes candid and devastating commentary from within the Bush administration. The AP covers it in Staff,"Ex-aides say Bush never recovered from Katrina," AP, 29 December.