Is American book reviewing in crisis? Yes, the historian Jeffrey Herf charges in a cri de coeur on The New Republic’s Open University blog. Space for book reviews is limited, the best-known reviews often slight university presses in favor of trade publishers with hefty advertising budgets, and review essays can become platforms for ideologies. “The time has come for an entrepreneur or entrepreneurs to get together with fair and distinguished editors to create a new weekly book review,” Herf proclaims to continuing plaudits from enthusiastic supporters and doubts from well-wishing detractors.
Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland: We know that a large number of very fine, well-written, deeply researched, and important works are being published in this country to the sound of deafening silence. We know that most of the vast nonspecialist audience of university graduates in the United States hasn’t a clue about what is going on in history, political science, sociology, economics, philosophy, literary criticism, art history, the natural sciences, and a host of other smaller academic disciplines. Indeed, despite much talk about interdisciplinary work, we know that within the academy, most scholars have only the foggiest notion of what is going on in other disciplines. ...
As a result our culture has become much less than the sum of its parts. The loudest and most strident voices, but not the best and most creative, affect public perception of what is happening in the academy. There is no point in romanticizing the universities or denying that some criticisms of political correctness and impenetrable prose are on the mark. Indeed, denying all this only fosters cynicism and disbelief in the general public.
Yet we also know that such criticisms do not capture all of the story. The American university is also filled with very fine scholars in a variety of disciplines. The fact that their work rarely comes to the attention of a nonspecialist audience is often due more to the absence of a transmission belt than of its intrinsic lack of quality. (Open University)
Cass R. Sunstein, University of Chicago: A real advantage of a good book-review section, or a good review of books, is that it gets a lot of ideas to a large audience in a pretty short space — so that people can read the book, if they want, but still learn a lot if they don’t want. Our political and literary cultures would really benefit from more and better in the way of publicly accessible reviews. (Open University)
Richard Stern, emeritus, University of Chicago: In certain movies of the 30s and 40s, one motif was “Let’s Put On a Show,” and sure enough, the local adolescents, the best known of whom were Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, were soon singing and dancing up a storm before the hearty appreciation of their peers and elders. The intellectual equivalent of this phenomenon in my lifetime has been “Let’s Start a Magazine.” ...
But the successes are few. What begins with the familiar ache of intelligent people that their important work has failed to be recognized, written about, or in some dire cases even noticed ends when the ache is somehow lessened and the energy and time required to put out the periodical are regarded as less important than their next work. (Open University)
Steven Pinker, Harvard University: Another pathology of many book-review forums is their lack of safeguards on fairness. In all walks of life, people are liable to abuse their perquisites in the absence of feedback mechanisms. That’s why we have grades in school, peer review in science, democracy in government, and so on. Book reviewing has survived as an exception to this rule: Reviewers can pass off glib dismissals without fear of consequences. The New York Review of Books, for example, might grudgingly give an aggrieved author a few words of self-defense, and then allow the reviewer unlimited space for renewed trash talk. Some of my colleagues in science are shocked at the ratio of bluster to content on the NYRB letters page, and at the sheer rudeness of the discourse. Internet-friendly feedback mechanisms, like blogs, frays, and votes, offer numerous ways to reinvent the book review and encourage greater checks and balances on the reviewing process. (Open University)
David A. Bell, Johns Hopkins University: My own sense, as a long-term advocate of electronic publishing, is that a weekly book review will most likely only make financial sense on the Web, in tandem with a system that allows readers to click on a link and instantly purchase the book in question. Or download a copy. (Open University)
Ross Douthat, The Atlantic: Look, I know where Herf is coming from: We live in an age that’s glutted with books, and I’m very well aware of how depressing it is to watch thousands of well-written and worthy volumes — one’s own included — appear over the course of the year and vanish without a trace. But this is a problem created by abundance (of would-be writers and publishers willing to take a chance on them), by specialization (the plethora of academic books that are extremely important, but only in extremely narrow fields), and by the mass market, which makes it harder for niche efforts to get traction in a world of Dan Browns. And as a result, it certainly can’t be solved by founding a book review that tackles an extra thousand or so books a year. (The American Scene)
Christopher Shea, journalist: Herf argues that it’s a crime that roughly 9,300 of the 10,000 books published by university presses each year get ignored. (He leaves out many publications, including The Atlantic and the Boston Review, in arriving at that figure.) But shouldn’t he at least make a nod toward the contention that humanities and some social-science departments have turned into factories producing books of often-negligible value? How many of those 9,300 books should even have been published, let alone reviewed? (The Boston Globe’s Brainiac)
Paul S. Horwitz, Southwestern Law School: One might have expected the blogosphere to fill some of this gap, since it makes low-cost publishing available rather than have to depend on a dwindling subscriber base of “sophisticated nonexperts.” Maybe it has filled the gap, even if I’m not aware that it has; it’s a big Net out there. In the legal realm, though, I’m not sure this has taken place. ... Not to be indelicate, but I can’t help but wonder whether both the tendency to focus on books published by popular presses, and the generally positive spin, have something to do with the fact that we bloggers sometimes get advance copies for free, and that the presses that are most active in sending us these copies tend to be the popular presses. (PrawfsBlawg)
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 27, Page B4