The Book Blawg

This looks interesting - The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir by Patricia Harman.

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer.

No, it's not great literature and yes, it is that good.

Sheri Menelli is offering downloadable copies of her book Journey into Motherhood: Inspirational Stories of Natural Birth for free. Get your copy here.

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, by Bill Tancer.

Bill Tancer loves data, and in his job he gets to work with a lot of it. He works for Hitwise, a company that analyzes online information, particularly search terms and online traffic. One of the examples that he gives in the book is that searches for prom dresses spikes in early January. He could come up with no explanation for this data, so he spoke with insiders in the prom dress industry, who were equally as clueless - they target their marketing for April and May, since most proms take place in late May. Finally, after sharing his data at a conference, a magazine publisher clued him in to the fact that teen magazines publish prom fashion issues in late December - a fact that, I'm sure, the prom dress industry needs to know.

While this book is in the same category as The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, it's not quite as good. Perhaps Mr. Tancer, being a data guy, is a bit more uncomfortable with "the big picture". But there is still a lot of great information here. I found the discussions of Web 2.0 and social networking particularly interesting.

Joe Hodnicki of the Law Librarian Blog writes a review here.

Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More, by Peter Walsh.

I listened to the audiobook of Walsh's It's All Too Much and loved it, so I was anxious to read his new book. It's really just the it's all too much philosophy applied to weight loss and food, with lots of Walsh's insights into human nature, as he has observed the connection between body clutter and "too much stuff" clutter.

The Tatum Family blogger reviews several great books on pregnancy and childbirth.

Molly Reads reviews three books I own and have read (though not necessarily blogged about):

Childbirth Education: Practice, Research and Theory, by Francine H. Nichols and Sharron Smith Humenick. (review)

Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding, by Naomi Baumslag, MD and Dia L. Michels. (review)

Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, by Jennifer Block. (review)

Audition: A Memoir, by Barbara Walters.

This book is really interesting, not so much because Barbara Walters is that fascinating - in fact, her constant low self-esteem and indecisiveness gets to be a bit wearing on the reader - but because she knew so many important, famous, and infamous people. In fact, I would suggest this book to someone older than me, as her career spans decades which I know little about, having been too young to experience them firsthand, and too old for them to get much coverage in history class.

Via Birth Pangs, a "laborious work of non-fiction" titled Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth.