Welcome to Miller’s Book Review 📚
Books are easy to underestimate. We tend to think of them as containers for information or stories. But books represent far more; they’re the technology that built our civilization. Science, law, religion, commerce, even how we conceive of the self in relationship to others—books contributed to them all and more.
I’m Joel J. Miller, and this is Miller’s Book Review, a place to read and think about fiction and nonfiction with that grand story in mind.
Wednesdays and Saturdays I review a classic or contemporary book or share an essay on something bookish: the habits and history of reading, literary culture, and the occasional curiosity from the publishing trade, where I worked for over a decade.
The Tasting Menu
If you’re looking for a sample of what’s on tap at Miller’s Book Review, here you go.
Essays
Fiction
Nonfiction
Conversations
If that roster looks intriguing, I bet you’ll enjoy the newsletter. Consider signing up! If you go the free route, you’ll get instant two-week access to most everything I publish. If you go paid, you’ll get access to the full archive, going all the way back to 2022, plus monthly Zoom calls and an exclusive member chat where we discuss all things literary.
And Who Am I, Exactly?
I’m a longtime professional editor and writer. I served as vice president of editorial and acquisitions for Thomas Nelson Publishers, an imprint of HarperCollins. I began as a senior editor at Nelson and eventually became publisher of the general trade division. In all, I was there about a dozen years.
Today I’m the chief content officer of Full Focus, where, among other things, we produce the wildly popular Full Focus Planner. I’m the author of several books, including The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future (Prometheus, 2025) and The Revolutionary Paul Revere (Thomas Nelson, 2010). I’ve written for Reason magazine, Big Think, the Washington Post, the American Spectator, National Review, and other publications. My work has been called “well-researched and bitingly written” by Publishers Weekly, “powerful” by The Washington Times, and “lively” by World magazine. You’ll have to tell me what you think about it.
I launched Miller's Book Review in 2021, and Substack named it a Featured Publication in 2023.
My interest in literary culture and book history grew out of my work in publishing. I was like a chef investigating the cuisine I cooked. I started with the memoirs of editors and publishers—people like Maxwell Perkins, William Jovanovich, Henry Regnery, and André Schiffrin—and wormed my way from there into the exotic history of the book itself. The Idea Machine emerged from that investigation, and Miller’s Book Review is where the adventure continues, week by week.
