Meet Karen Sandlin Silverman and Scott Silverman Karen Sandlin Silverman Review Count: 47 From her oeuvre: Stacy Horn’s The Restless Sleep Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont Scott H. Silverman Review Count: 110 From his oeuvre: William Finnegan’s Cold New World Michael A. Bellesiles’s Arming America

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Married for 23 years, Pennsylvanians Karen and Scott Silverman share many things, including reviewing books in the social sciences for LJ. Scott describes how they met, working in the library during library school. "We had adjoining desks, and we argued constantly. Until we didn’t suddenly." Scott, LJ’s nonfiction reviewer of the year in 2004, began reviewing 16 years ago and vividly recalls his first fraught experience. "The first book arrived right after our second daughter was born. My eldest and I had the flu together, and I would sleep for hours after reading a bit." Eight years later, after stealing a neglected galley from Scott’s nightstand, Karen reviewed it as a lark and became a regular contributor. Karen, manager of library services at the Center for Applied Research, a management consulting firm, spans the true crime genre for LJ, from books on the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad to the Boston Strangler. She keeps the family networked, although she and Scott were ashamed to admit they don’t blog—as if a catalog of their home library at Bookpedia and travel info organized on PBwiki aren’t enough. She also notes their habit of "trying to find a movie to screen that relates to the books we’re reviewing. We plan to watch Hitchcock’s Rope to accompany my current book on Leopold and Loeb, [Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It]." Scott, a senior administrator in Information Services (among other things) at Bryn Mawr College, mostly reviews big-idea, deep-thoughts history and political science tomes and doesn’t worry too much about Karen nabbing his review books. Regarding hers, he says, "I’m not that into true crime. Actually, who am I kidding—I like crime and violence as much as any typical librarian." And Karen will admit to stealing books from Scott’s stint on ALA’s Notable Books Council. Of that experience, he says, "it entailed having to form very meaningful relationships with hundreds of books (and physical receipt of 1000-plus), and that was close to impossible. It completely deromanticized reading for me. But it was also a blast." Luckily for us, he also believes "making time for reading is like choosing to breathe—you have to do it or you die, right?"