[Publib] Reviewing Decline

[Backwage at aol.com]

If you want to see an excellent article about the state  of book reviewing in 
the nation’s newspapers, this month’s Columbia Journalism Review contains a  
very fine piece by Steve Wasserman, a man who until recently edited the book  
review section of the Los Angeles  Times.   
Wasserman is right on the money when he describes the  enemies of a good book 
review—principal among them the fact that most reviews  lose money at 
astonishing rates, and are carried by their parent publications as  a sort of grace 
note to the rest of the paper.   
[Wasserman’s article:  
_http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php?page=all_ 
(http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php?page=all) ]  
What Wasserman doesn’t say is that one of the more serious problems  facing 
book reviews is the lack of material, which results as much from the lack  of 
decent writing to print as the lack of money to pay for articles. 
A serious book review requires not only depth of analysis  but an ability to 
portray the work in question adequately.  In  America, the  thing we call book 
reviewing is divided into two parts:  those brief explanatory blurbs, and  
serious work, the thing Europeans know as book reviewing—the exploratory essay  
devoted to a particular written work.   
It is a crime to even refer to the one- or two-paragraph  comment an actual 
review; even the library publications which put out such  material should feel 
themselves responsible in part for the decline in the  art.   
Long ago, libraries and librarians used to devote time and resources to  the 
actual reviewing, which is to say, the criticism and analysis, of  books.  
This has gone by the wayside  for a variety of reasons, not least: 
    1.  The terrible assumption that the librarian  should not publish 
opinions as to the nature and quality of books intended for  public consumption.
    1.  The belief that book reviewing is something best  handled by 
specialists remote from the field of librarianship—as if there were  such specialists, 
or they had more right and reason to review  books.
    1.  The fact that writing skills have declined,  which is to say the 
ability of the average intelligent person, and even  librarians, to write well and 
convincingly.
    1.  An alleged lack of forums; while this is true of  the old variety, it 
has become easier than ever to create a web log or similar  device to publish 
reviews, either as the official output of a library or of an  individual 
librarian. 
All this having been said, I adhere to earlier comments  about the librarian’
s role in book reviewing stated here:  
_http://librarydust.typepad.com/library_dust/2004/07/on_reviewing_bo.html_ 
(http://librarydust.typepad.com/library_dust/2004/07/on_reviewing_bo.html)   
Michael  McGrorty



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