BookWars next introduces another group of street booksellers who hawk their trade on nearby 6th Avenue. Mainly black and minority individuals, they ply books and magazines in parallel fashion to the nearby West 4th street booksellers, who are primarily white.

Another great guide to the Civil War is the New York Times’ acclaimed book ( and blog) Disunion, which has been narrating the war in a series of amazing articles coinciding roughly with the 150th anniversary for the last few years.Again, casual assumptions might have been that these trade publishers should have seen the digital disruption in scholarly publishing during the ’90s and moved more rapidly to rethink their business models.

This aspires to be the exhaustive authority on books and book publishing but it is too long and repetitious that it leaves any avid reader exhausted instead. The reason this book stops at Waterloo and mentions nothing of the Civil War, or the World Wars, is that it was written in 1851.This is a segment of the population often without the resources and support networks to deal with things like Traumatic Brain Injury (which is a LOT more serious than PTSD). Others, who have had their books confiscated, wait for hours at the police station to get them back. While the book ends around 2020, it offers little hope on the legal horizon for addressing the monopolistic power of technology companies, given the current make-up of the US Supreme Court. Marv and Ron, however, continue to sell books throughout the winter on busy 6th Avenue, and the film follows them as they scour for books and pornographic magazines in the trash in Soho. Given that spectrum of available formats, one can’t help but assume that someone, somewhere, must be making a tidy profit.

The street booksellers resist and assemble to form an unlikely common front to protest against the actions of the city.

Two former Marine officers suggested I end this list with a book about what happens when people leave the military. Yet to this reader, the historic transformations brought on by the move to digital production over the last 40 years have also led to a major loss of jobs in the fields of publishing, something barely considered in Book Wars. And with Seven Pillars of Wisdom he wrote an excellent — if at times embellished — account of his time as a liaison with rebel forces during Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916.