the long slide

TNR rallies around the beleaguered book and mourns the loss of respect for book reviewing:

A book review may be many things. It may be only a tip, a consumer’s guide to what might satisfy at the airport or the beach. But it may be much more. The intelligent discussion of a book has the power to change its reader’s ideas about how he votes or who he loves–to furnish nothing less than a “criticism of life,” in the old but still sterling Arnoldian phrase. In less than an hour–we are all of us, even us high-minded types, busy people–it can transform a person’s thinking, and also redirect it by leading him to other books with other theories and other beauties. It can also, if it is lucidly thought and written, teach by example. And if the reader of a smart and learned book review finds himself in vehement disagreement with it, well, his little lesson has been even more rich. Book reviewing is a training for controversy, without which no open society and no open individual can flourish.

Very true. These days, however, if a reader finds herself in vehement disagreement with a review and she happens to be an author, she can go on her blog and denounce the reviewer as a “very bitter, confused old lady” with her “granny panties in a bunch.”

That too is “training for controversy,” albeit of a different kind…