The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Meanwhile, Evgeny Morozov writes, "I challenge you to find a stronger first paragraph in entire history of hostile book reviews." Here's the review in question:
This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor. This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.
Go on, Ricochet, take the challenge.
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Comments :
Oct '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
"Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."
The famous Dale Peck review.
Apr '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the
restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences
against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"
Edited on Nov 30, 2011 at 5:25amSep '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
I cannot find a link to the actual review, so I will not link to extant commentary on the review, but Leon Wolf's scathingly funny review of Meghan McCain's Dirty, Sexy Politics in the New Ledger in September 2010 is a contender. But at least Meghan McCain does not pretend to be a scholar. The book review you're blogging about is dead on and could be applied to hundreds of postmodern, poststructural, post-whatever-the-author-wants-it-to-be books and journal articles that are published each year. I know because I spend a lot of time copyediting books like this: utter drivel dripping with the dogma of academe. I keep thinking this well of freelance work is going to go dry—only in utter decadence can this go on!—so I try to prepare myself by seeking out additional riverlets of editing work beyond the wadis of university presses, but amazingly it never completely dries up. ... People don't believe me when I tell them how horrible the humanities are today. It would be funny except that this is the source of theoretical thinking embraced by Obama and OWS.
Apr '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
The American Mathematical Society review of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Don't miss the part where the reviewer compares the book to the Bhagavad Gita.
Sep '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
What a lovely start to a book review. Thanks, Claire--this made my day.
Nov '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
I think the classic is Croker's 1818 review of Keats' Endymion, often referred to as "The Review That Killed Keats". It starts:
The whole thing is quite worth the read.
Apr '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Thanks for linking to that review. It just gets better and better from the first paragraph.
Ouch!
Nov '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Lovely contest. Mark Twain's review in A Cure for the Blues of G. Ragsdale McClintock's The Enemy Conquered; or Love Triumphant ought to be a leading contestant. (The actual name of the author, a graduate in 1845 of the Yale Law School, was Samuel Watson Royston.) Here is a little taste:
Oct '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Parts of the review Claire quotes remind me of Dorothy Parker, so here is an excerpt of one of hers, chosen nearly at random:
Oct '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Not from the first paragraph but contained within Morozov's own review of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts:
Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new mediaacademics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of postmodernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet. Stripped of all the inspirational buzzwords, it offers a two-fold, and insipid, argument. First, a democratic society cannot afford to have privacy as its main—let alone its only—value. Second, the acts of information disclosure—by individuals, corporations, or public institutions—can be beneficial, under certain conditions, to some or all of the parties involved. Jarvis believes that these points are new and original and heroically subversive of the conventional wisdom. Public Parts is meant to be a polemic, but Jarvis has a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with either of his premises.
Edited on Nov 30, 2011 at 8:25amJun '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
I love these, and Claire's is still in first place.
Since Glenn stole my Twain/Cooper example, I'll simply point out that there is wonderful trove of comments by good writers criticizing bad critics. One of my favorites is from John Osborne: "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what he thinks about dogs.”
Edited on Nov 30, 2011 at 8:30amJun '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
This doesn't rise to the level of several examples above, but it's still pretty good. In the November 2011 issue of First Things, Edward Feser reviews Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. In the last two paragraphs, Feser unleashes a big pin to puncture Rosenberg's "no illusions" balloon:
He zings Rosenberg pretty good.
Aug '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Michael Pate:
This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.
That one sentence made me laugh out loud. I'm glad my cubicle-mate was out of the office at the time.
Jul '10
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
Ambrose Bierce once dispatched a hapless author with a review that consisted solely of the sentence "The covers of this book are too far apart."
Apr '11
Re: The Hostile Book Review Challenge
tabula rasa: I love these, and Claire's is still in first place.
Since Glenn stole my Twain/Cooper example, I'll simply point out that there is wonderful trove of comments by good writers criticizing bad critics. One of my favorites is from John Osborne: "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what he thinks about dogs.”
Edited on Nov 30 at 08:30 am
Well, Sandy beat me to my second choice from Twain. I read a generally positive review, in Time, I believe, of Jake's Thing when it was first published. One line, "Random testiness of this sort is one reason to read Amis; another is the more developed spleen..." prompted me to read the book. It was sadly disappointing.
Barnes & Noble published a slim volume a few years back titled Rotten Reviews. It was a collection of a line or two from reviews of books now considered classics. Absalom, Absalom and Leaves of Grass were two that came in for rough treatment.