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Publishers are producing new reference sources on film at an astonishing rate. Each week reviews and advertisements appear to announce yet another book. Books vary in scope, subject emphasis, size, price, and of course, quality, and represent both new works and revised or added editions. Not only are American publishers active, but European firms are getting on the bandwagon, too.

NANCY ALLEN is Communications Librarian at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where she has previously held the positions of Assistant Undergraduate Librarian and Reserve Book Librarian. She earned her M.S. in Library Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Ms. Allen's writings have appeared in American Libraries, Film Library Quarterly, and Journalism Quarterly. She is author of Film Study Collections: A Guide to Their Development and Use.

As I make my last contribution as editor of Advances in Librarianship, I would like to say a few words about my twelve years’ experience with this annual. My tenure has greatly enriched my life both professionally and personally. My first association with Advances goes back to 1980 when I was asked to submit an article on library materials budgeting for volume 10. Later, in 1992 I joined Advances as a member of its editorial advisory board. At that time, Irene Godden (Colorado State) edited the volume. I owe her a great debt for her counseling and guidance. After Godden resigned in 1998, I took over as co-editor of Advances and from 2001 (volume 25) I have been its sole editor. Through all these years, I truly enjoyed working with my colleagues on the editorial board and with the many prominent librarians whose papers appeared in Advances. I am especially grateful to Nancy Allen (University of Denver), G. Edward Evans (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles), and Mary Jean Pavelsek (NYU), longtime editorial board members, who constantly provided encouragement and support. As editor I worked closely with the publishing staff, first at Academic and later Elsevier. I would like to single out both Marvin Yelles (Academic) and Christopher Pringle (Elsevier) and their assistants, Naomi Henning and Julie Neden, for their excellent work in turning manuscripts into the fine finished books that the reader sees.

This review of Amy Allen’s book, The End of Progress (2016), first addresses the structure of the book and focuses on specific points made in individual chapters, including the affinity between postcolonial theory and the approaches of Adorno and Foucault in subjecting the notion of historical progress to “withering critique,” and Allen’s alternative approach to decolonization; Habermas’ aim to put critical theory on a secure normative footing; Honneth’s stance that the history of an ethical sphere is an unplanned learning process kept in motion by a struggle for recognition; Forst’s attempt to reconstruct Critical Theory’s normative account through a return to Kant rather than Hegel; and Allen’s claim that her approach is fully in the spirit of Critical Theory and could be seen as continuation of Critical Theory’s first generation, as in Adorno, and how it is a “genealogical” approach that draws on Adorno’s negative dialectics and critique of identity thinking, as well as on Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, as developed by Foucault. The second part of my response raises three issues: (1) Allen’s partial compromise with the idea of progress; (2) whether critical theory would profit from engagement with other critical theories and theories of ethics, beyond postcolonial theory; and (3) nonwestern theories shed a different light on the question of Allen’s critique, a theme that also draws attention to the gesture of decolonizing, the distinctions between colonialism and empire, and the sociology of knowledge production.

The mass media are cultural pipelines through which flow hours of entertainment and information. They represent a part of our culture which critics decry and media specialists praise. They are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. Television (free, cable, or pay) is the subject of attention of three‐year‐olds and Ph.D. candidates alike. Newspapers are perused daily by all classes and conditions of people and their content, ownership patterns, and circulation statistics are studied in journalism classes, high schools, and by worried editors and publishers. Films entertained children in Nickelodeons, raised the spirits of millions during World War II, and now are the subject of so much analysis that words like ‘pan,’ ‘take,’ and ‘track’ have taken on new meaning in the vocabulary of most ordinary citizens.