Just fin­ished writ­ing another Blog­Crit­ics arti­cle.

Reviewed two of Wal­lace Wang’s lat­est books on using Mac devices. The pro­lific Wang, a stand-​up come­dian as well as a tech writer, has writ­ten dozens of books. My New Mac, Snow Leop­ard Edi­tion and My New iPhone — 52 Projects to Get You Started… pub­lished by no starch press.

Back when I presided over the Pop­mat­ters books arena, the preach­ing began in earnest. No first per­son. No per­sonal expe­ri­ences. These are reviews. Pure reviews. Cri­tiques. No book reports, don’t sum­ma­rize the plot, fol­low the guide­lines for cre­ative non-​fiction. But the advent of blogs and opin­ions — the whole review scene has changed dras­ti­cally in the last five years. It is now all per­sonal. You should lis­ten to me because I am an author­ity. My pro­fes­sors would be cring­ing with dis­gust. I gotta’ tell ya’, it’s so very much fun to write from the per­sonal. Cre­ative non-​fiction is an art form, in my view. Blog­ging is a diary, and that’s how I’m approach­ing my Blog­Crit­ics articles.

The Wal­lace Wang book review arti­cle will only appear on Blog­Crit­ics, so click right here to read it in its entirety — but here’s a teaser.

With cov­ers in mind, let us con­sider the pub­lisher no starch press and writer Wal­lace Wang. We’ll take a phys­i­cal tour of his two instruc­tion man­u­als: My New Mac, Snow Leop­ard Edi­tion and My New iPhone, each bear­ing the sub-​title: 52 Sim­ple Projects to Get You Started. (Snow Leop­ard edi­tion refers to the lat­est ver­sion of the Mac­in­tosh oper­at­ing sys­tem, OS X. The iPhone/​iTouch is a hand-​held com­put­ing device.)

The idea for this review came sim­ply enough. Oliver, age five, Emmett age three, and me, age inde­ter­mi­nate com­prised a small mot­ley crew accom­pa­nied by a 45-​pound, 8-​month old Rottweiler/​Shar Pei mix on a six-​foot lead. We just walked the lump-​puppy around the neigh­bor­hood, try­ing to wear her out. Our jour­ney com­plete, we rounded the final cor­ner toward home. Just then, Oliver spot­ted the mail­man com­ing down the stairs of our front porch. “It’s a pack­age! It’s a pack­age! Can I open it?”