Viviane Serfaty 2003: The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, 11. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 144 pp. José Ángel García Landa Universidad de Zaragoza garciala@unizar.es The concepts of online diary and blog intersect but need not coincide. An unblogged online diary may be, to take an extreme case, an electronic edition of Pepys’ Diary, or, more commonly, a diaristic web page which does not take the reader to the most recently dated entry, but to the initial one. If such an online diary is regularly updated, though, it becomes almost (though perhaps not quite) a blog. Diaries are usually personal self-narratives, and blogs provide a powerful medium for the publication of online diaries. But the contents of a blog need not be diaristic or personal at all; and blogs need not be authored by a single individual; indeed, they rarely are, although most have one main author or editor. That said, there is much common ground between online diaries and blogs. Viviane Serfaty’s book deals with this shared ground, the book’s main object of study being blogs which are used for personal expression and life-writing, rather than as specialised journalism, collective forums, or pure weblogging (understood as a mere sequence of links to interesting new sites). Serfaty’s focus on the intersection between online diaries and weblogs leads her, though, to disregard those aspects of the blogging phenomenon which do not fall under this head (e.g. newsblogs, collective blogs, technical blogs, professional blogs, sex blogs, moblogs, etc.) and to argue rather sweepingly that “the distinction between diaries and weblogs is increasingly meaningless, as one form seems to have morphed into the other” (22). She does note, though, a crucial difference regarding software: “Weblogs are different inasmuch as the software is in charge of displaying readers’ answers; the blogger has very little scope for editing or deleting answers. In addition, responding to an entry is usually not done through email but through a form located at the bottom of the page” (66). But even that would need to be contextualised, as bloggers are given more and more options by an increasing number of blogging platforms and software developers. The introduction makes it clear that for Serfaty, “for all their apparent and sometimes actual novelty, online diaries and weblogs are but the latest avatars in the long history of self-representational writing” (1). The introduction provides a sketch of this history, and much of the rest of the book, especially chapter 2, emphasizes the kinship between blogs and previous forms of life-writing in the tradition of modern self-expression. French theorists, such as Philippe Lejeune and, most prominently, Georges Gusdorf, provide the theoretical and historical background at this point. Three major sources are pointed out for the development of modern life-writing: Catholicism (St. Theresa, J. H. Newman), English Puritanism (e.g. Bunyan) and Libertinism (leading to Pepys and Rousseau). “The development of a private space, where thought could roam freely” apart from dogma (6) leads eventually, in Rousseau, to the rule of desire as the prime mover of the modern individual. Diaries constitute truth as a space of interpretation, where dating entries is essential but revision and reinterpretation may also enter into the picture, thus compromising any claim to a faithful portrayal of reality. Individuals represent, justify and re-create themselves through their life-writing, with the writing itself feeding back into the