On Book Reviewing (Debate-Free Post)

In which I break Hillel's Golden Rule and my own guidelines. Also, a new video.

Pity the poor book review editor, trying to pick which favored few books to review and guess which reviewers will do a good job.

I’ve been thinking about book reviews lately. One reason is that I finally read—or, more accurately, listened to—a Willa Cather novel I found meh. It was One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 but got bad reviews from the critics Cather cared about. (Alex Ross explains in this New Yorker appreciation of the book.) The reviews weren’t fair, but there’s still something flat about her scenes once the protagonist gets to France, where he’s serving in World War I.

The other reason I will get to after some back story.

In my 10 years editing Reason, I found assigning and editing book reviews one of the most challenging parts of a challenging job. There were way more promising new titles than we had room to review. Reviewers would not infrequently accept an assignment and then never turn in the review. Or they’d turn in the review nine months after the book came out (a known risk with academics). Those were the simple challenges.

The worst result was when someone agreed to review a relatively obscure book that I thought worthy of bringing to readers’ attention, only to trash it. Telling readers not to read a book they’d never heard of, a book nobody was talking about, seemed like a a waste of everyone’s time. On the flip side, there were times when when we assigned an influential book by a prominent author that needed a thorough demolition, only to get a glowing review—a doubly difficult position if the reviewer held a Nobel Prize.

As soon as I became editor I faced blowback from a book review dating to my predecessor’s editorship (although I was in the meeting where the reviewer was decided on). Paul Weaver wrote a review of Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand that, while praising the book in ways likely to move copies, panned the man. He concluded that Branden was “a hypocrite and a traitor” and his account “an exercise in self-aggrandizement” that “seethes with unacknowledged animus against first-wife Barbara (author of a successful and mostly adulatory biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand) and Rand herself.”

Needless to say, Branden wasn’t happy, all the more so because he considered himself responsible for Reason’s existence. Years earlier, he’d let Reason use the Nathaniel Branden Institute mailing list to built its first subscriber base. Branden complained to my boss, Bob Poole. I agreed to have lunch with him. It was an awkward encounter. Branden was miffed that he was meeting with me rather than Bob. I explained that I was in charge of editorial decisions. Branden wanted us to publish a retraction. I offered him space in letters to the editor. He was not mollified. But I wasn’t going to back down and I knew that Bob knew that if he forced the issue I’d quit. Having just gone through a search process and seen just how hard it was to find a qualified editor who’d work for $45,000, he wasn’t going to interfere. I’m sure he was nearly as unhappy as Branden.

My policy was always to run the review, assuming it wasn’t horribly late (I did kill a few for that reason), and live with any editorial discomfort or organizational consequences. Other editors have different policies and, with the benefit of age and experience, I understand them. (If put in charge of a review section,I would probably adopt the same policies I followed 30 years ago. I just no longer condemn people who prefer other approaches.)

In the vast landscape of books, reviews provide a sort of treasure map.

Books are abundant and attention is scarce. As physical bookstores have disappeared, random book discoveries have gotten less likely. Reviews are incredibly important to whether a book takes off or gets lost.

I’ve been on the receiving end of disappointing reviews, as well as nonexistent ones. Not even Publisher’s Weekly reviewed The Future and Its Enemies! I had always assumed they reviewed every book from a major publisher and used to rely on them in asking for review copies. Getting noticed at all is a major accomplishment.

Generally speaking, I try to do two things when asked to write a review. The first is to give the book the kind of careful reading that I would hope to get as an author. If time permits, I read the book twice. If not, I read it thoroughly once and reread lots of marked passages in lieu of every word. The second is to stick to books that I either like on the whole or at least learn interesting things from. (This review of David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom, which I was sick of by the time I got to the end, is an example of the latter.) An intellectual tussle is fine, but I try to avoid writing “don’t waste your time” reviews.

I recently found myself breaking that rule. I agreed to review a book that turned out to be terrible—not because of its point of view, although I take issue with that, but because of the way it made its arguments. It was a mess. Instead of the political-cultural-philosophical discussion I expected, I wound up writing a brutal referee report. Reason, which wasn’t the original publication to assign the review, ran the review here.

It was an honest review, but I still feel a pang of empathy for the author. She was not well served by her editor(s) and whoever else she asked to read the manuscript. One of my advantages as an author is that I have an in-house Reviewer 2, who loves me enough to bring the power of his considerable critical skills to bear on my work.¹ The Power of Glamour is much better for his relentless and blunt critiques, which in at least one instance led me to throw the manuscript across the room. I was mad because he was right.

And now for something completely different…

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1. Judging from the in-house example, Reviewer 2 is annoying but thoughtful, careful, and generous with time. It takes such a reviewer much longer to write a review, both because of the amount of time spent evaluating the manuscript and the unpleasantness of the task.