From Tenured Radical comes news that Ned Blackhawk is leaving the University of Wisconsin for a professorship in Yale's history department. His first book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, won awards from the OAH, the ASA, the Western History Association, and the American Society for Ethnohistory.

Ziauddin Sardar reviews Jonathan Lyons's The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization for the London Times, 22 January.

Robert Cushman,"Pop goes The Bard," National Post, 23 January, reviews Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare and Modern Culture.

Keith Thomas,"To Buy or Not to Buy: The Origins of Good Taste," History Today, February, finds in 17th century England's consumer culture the origins of desire for"markers of wealth, status, and good taste." Hat tip.

DD Guttenplan for the Guardian, 17 January, Max Hastings for the London Times, 25 January, and Alan Marshall for the Telegraph, 16 January, review David Reynolds's America, Empire of Liberty: A New History."Reynolds is just cloth-eared," says Guttenplan,"when it comes to American culture." Thanks to Mary Dudziak for the tip.

Jon Carey reviews Steve Jones's Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England and Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins for the London Times, 25 January.

Matt Yglesias, Rob Farley, and Scott Kaufman discuss popular literature's amnesia about the great flu pandemic of 1918.

John Lanchester,"Heroes and Zeroes," New Yorker, 2 February, reviews Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.

Dominic Lawson reviews Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Dominic Raab's The Assault on Liberty for the London Times, 25 January.

Anthony Beevor reviews William I. Hitchcock's Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945 for the TLS, 23 January.