INSTRUCTIONS

Welcome to the search page. A lot of time and effort has gone into making this section of the site work correctly. The search page is divided into three sections. In the first you can search by all the ordinary book characteristics: Title, author, year published, etc. If you know what you are looking for, this is probably the quickest way to see if a review has been published.

In the second section there is only one text box, labeled as "Text." It allows you to search all of the reviews for certain character strings. Use this if you have read the reviews and want to find a specific term that you remember, or if you want to see if I have commented on a book that has not been reviewed yet.

Below that are the tags. The tags offer the most dynamic method of searching the database. Every book review has been associated with one or more (most often many) of these descriptive tags. This way you can search books by type, or any other number of categories. Using them you will be able to narrow down your book search based on characteristics other than title, author, publisher and date. For example, if you are looking for an end-of-the-world book about plagues, click on either Catastrophe or Eschatology and Plague, and submit the query by clicking on "Search for Books with ALL of these Tags." What you will get are books that have been tagged with each and every tag you submitted a search for. If you get no results by doing that, try backing up and clicking on "Search for Books with ANY of these Tags." By doing that you will get results that show books that have any of the tags you searched for. That result set typically will be bigger, but you can pare results down by eye.

Remember, if you click on multiple tags then click on "ALL," then you are asking the machine to do an "and" Boolean search. If you click on "ANY," then you are submitting an "or" Boolean search. It works here essentially the same way as on Google.