Sunday, July 5, 2009

Book Reviews as a Blood Sport, Chapter II


Alain de Botton's attack on a book reviewer is in a fine tradition of literary punch-ups. Novelist and critic Philip Hensher reviews some legendary insults and explains how he dishes up revenge


The critics are taking flak on the opposite side of the pond as well ...

Kingsley Amis allowed that you should let a bad review spoil your breakfast, but not your lunch.
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THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK

By Alain de Botton
Illustrated. Pantheon Books. 327 pp. $26

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Book Reviews as a Blood Sport


by Carter Jefferson,
Editor of The Internet Review of Books

The novelist Alice Hoffman and the down-to-earth philosopher Alain de Botton have posed an interesting problem for anybody who writes anything that gets reviewed.

Both write bestsellers regularly, and both recently suffered from reviews of their latest books that, to put it mildly, suggested those works were less than first rate. Whereupon they both lost their cool and issued rants against the reviewers for the world to see. Within minutes everybody who follows anything remotely literary was informed of all the details. Both authors half-heartedly apologized. Twitter nearly caught on fire.

Is their a lesson in this? I'm not sure. Should writers be above it all, and ignore reviews? I've always maintained that any review is better than no review--reviews, good or bad, are free publicity. Besides, irate fans often write letters to whoever published the reviews complaining of injustice, and that's more publicity. Therefore, some say, it's best to ignore those insults.

But maybe Hoffman and de Botton have stumbled on something worth considering. Those rants produced more publicity than twenty essays praising the books to the sky would have. People who never heard of either one of them now know they exist.

I've written a few hundred reviews, and almost none of them were unstinted praise. (My stinter works overtime, I guess.) Maybe five percent of the authors thanked me for the reviews. Nobody ever issued a rant condemning my comments. But think how pleased I would have been had somebody blasted my review in some widely read publication, or in 140 well-chosen screaming tweetly characters? That would be priceless publicity for *me*!

So I'm about to conclude that authors should raise hell when a reviewer issues even a whisper of criticism. That rant might catch on and pay off for all concerned. More people would buy the book, and readers would flock to read my next review to see whether I'm drawing and quartering another victim.

But I'm not quite sure yet. Politeness has long been considered a virtue. Maybe in these changing times we should reconsider that, but maybe not. What do you think?

Roberta Silman's review of
THE STORY SISTERS
By Alice Hoffman
Shaye Areheart, 325 pp., $25

Hoffman fires a shot at Silman.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Brief Reviews: Nonfiction


NESTED ECOLOGY:
The Place of Humans in the Ecological Hierarchy
By Edward T. Wimberly
264 pp. Johns Hopkins University Press $60

BOTTOM OF THE NINTH:
Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself
By Michael Shapiro
320 pp. Times Books $26

A POCKETFUL OF HISTORY:
Four Hundred Years of America—One State Quarter at a Time
By Jim Noles
400 pp. Da Capo Press Paperback (updated) $16

IF IT AIN’T TRUE, IT OUGHTA BE AND OTHER LESSONS FROM LIFE

By William Shewmake
168 pp. James A. Rock & Co. $12.95

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Chasing Pancho Villa


FAR BRIGHT STAR
By Robert Olmstead
207 pp. Algonquin Books $23.95
Reviewed by Alan Goodman
Shortly before the United States entered WWI the country became embroiled in a series of skirmishes with Mexico. Several memorable names are associated with that involvement, including Americans General John “Blackjack” Pershing and then-Lieutenant George Patton. For the Mexican cause, the name Generalissimo Pancho Villa rings out to this day as a symbol of Mexican aspiration for the cause of liberty. Depending largely upon which side of the border one lived, Villa was either a murdering, indiscriminate rogue killer out for his own interests, or a South-Of-The-Border Robin Hood avenging injustice and offering hope to his country’s underprivileged.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Calling Cards and Firing Squads


HE LAST PRINCE OF THE MEXICAN EMPIRE
By C. M. Mayo
418 pp. Unbridled Books $26.95
Reviewed by Jack Shakely

At the dawn of the age of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the carte de visite was wildly popular. These cheap—and ubiquitous—two-and-a-half by four inch photographs on card stock, now almost forgotten, were printed by the hundreds of millions. People used them as calling cards, and no person of wealth or social status would go visiting without one. They were collected by society’s elite the way boys would collect baseball cards a few generations later. Exotic people, places, and events were brought for the first time before the curious eyes of the civilized world.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Truth of Life in Bermuda


BASIL’S DREAM
By Christine Hale
292 pp. Livingston Press $16.95
Review by Gilion Dumas
Basil’s Dream by Christine Hale has all the makings of a National Book Award winner. That is not to say that it is the most entertaining or approachable book around, but it has all the necessary ingredients: an interesting hook, a complex plot, multi-dimensional characters in complicated relationships, big ideas with some moral ambiguity, and literary merit.

Allure of the Road Not Taken


CORNER SHOP
By Roopa Farooki
368 pp. St. Martin’s Press $24.95
Reviewed by Dawn Kingsbury Wakefield
Fourteen-year-old footballer Lucky Khalil knows his destiny is to win the World Cup for England. And Lucky couldn’t be luckier; when he’s not practicing, he lives in a posh Knightsbridge flat with his lawyer dad and socialite mum. His room is papered with Star Wars posters. His granddad, Zaki Khalil, owns a corner shop in the dodgy end of Hammersmith where Lucky can get his magazines and sweets for free. Now if he could only figure out how to get into his girlfriend Portia’s knickers.

Publishing & Book Reviews in the News

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