April 12, 2007
The joy of bad reviews
I have a guilty pleasure. One of the literary forms I most enjoy is the savage book review. The pleasure is a guilty one because you cannot avoid feeling a twinge of pity for the victim. Imagine the mortification: you spend months or years, labouring away on a book. And what do you get in return – public vilification and humiliation.
But the author of a truly savage book review is still performing a public service. If you publish a book, you are asking to be taken seriously. A “good” bad review does precisely this. It engages with the text far more vigorously than the usual tepid praise by a reviewer who has flicked quickly through a volume. And the best savage reviews are usually very funny. All of the four articles that I link to below - by Garrison Keillor, Robert Kagan, Matt Taibbi and Clive Crook – made me laugh out loud. This post is really just a way of drawing them to your attention.
A really good bad review usually follows a couple of rules. First, the target should be a worthy one. It is no fun watching a Harvard professor squish a young academic from a minor college. That is just cruel. The reviewer needs to be taking on someone with a large reputation and a big ego. All of the reviews below qualify. The targets are Bernard-Henri Levy – France’s most fashionable philosopher; Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International; Tom Friedman, possibly the world’s most famous newspaper columnist and George Soros, a globally-celebrated financier and philanthropist. These are all people who can look after themselves.
Second, the review should mix in personal abuse with intellectual criticism. This sounds counter-intuitive. Surely, the reviewer should rise above the merely personal – otherwise the review will look like a mere settling of scores? Not at all. A really good bad review needs a certain savage energy and humour – and this really only happens, if the reviewer is personally offended not just by the book but by the person.
In fact - in all of the reviews below - the critique of the person is closely tied up with the critique of the ideas. Kagan clearly feels that Zakaria’s anti-democratic ideas stem from personal snobbery; Keillor finds Henri-Levys smug and pretentious – and the same goes for his book. The fact that the little-known Taibbi is obviously partly inspired by jealousy of Friedman’s massive success does not detract from the review. On the contrary, it makes it better and funnier.
But that’s enough literary criticism. Here are the reviews. They are all different in their way. I would say that the Keillor (published in 2006) is the funniest, and if you only have a little time – read it first. It’s a masterpiece.
Next up is Kagan. [Update: a better link is here - thanks, Hugh] This is probably the most controlled review and the most intellectually substantial. There is a real debate going on here between the apostle of global democratisation (the neo-conservative Kagan) and a much more sceptical Zakaria. In the real world – given current developments in the Middle East – Zakaria may have the upper hand. But Kagan’s review is devastating and funny. It makes a quiet start and gradually builds up. (The link I’m putting in is to the New Republic and only offers you the first paragraph – but if you type Kagan and Zakaria into Google, the first offering should give you the full text.)
The longest review is Taibbi on “The World is Flat”. This one is a real rant.
Finally, here is Clive Crook on George Soros from The Economist in 1998. Watch out for a particularly fine scatalogical metaphor at the end. And yes, I know that The Economist is anonymous. But I was working there at the time, so I know who wrote the review. And, as it happens, Clive is joining the FT as a columnist later this month.
Surely you should also point to the master, Mark Twain (especially apposite as as the Keillor mentions Fenimore Cooper). For some reason your comments machine won’t let me put in a link, so here’s a url http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html
Posted by: Oliver | April 12th, 2007 at 7:09 pm | Report this commentMike Kinsley’s demolition of David Brooks ranks pretty high on the scale of such things. Not savage in the brutal sense, more surgical - but perhaps more deadly as a result. It’s hard to take Brooks seriosuly ever again.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02EEDB1F3CF930A15756C0A9629C8B63
Posted by: Mr Z | April 13th, 2007 at 8:08 am | Report this commentMr. Rachman might enjoy Geoffrey K. Pullum’s analysis of ‘The Da Vinci Code’:
Posted by: Anonymous | April 13th, 2007 at 9:21 am | Report this commenthttp://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html
It had me in stitches.
After all the hype, I was disappointed to find that the Keillor review wasn’t funny at all.
There was no intelligent humour in it. Bits you might smile at out of politness in front of the author, because you’d recognise he was trying (very hard) to make a joke.
It read more like a defensive and sniffy series of pot-shots. Come on, Gideon, I expected more.
Or was the purpose of this whole exercise simply to plug Clive Crook’s imminent arrival……..?
Posted by: Anonymous | April 13th, 2007 at 2:41 pm | Report this commentCould you post the entire Kagan review? When I tried to read it, I was confronted with a subscription demand in order to see the entire article.
Posted by: Hugh | April 16th, 2007 at 10:47 am | Report this commentSorry. Just too impatient. That’s the internet for you. Encourages all the worst tendencies.
Posted by: Hugh | April 16th, 2007 at 10:58 am | Report this commentBy the time I got to Google, kagan and zakaria did not produce the review in the first line, but almost at the end of the first page.
I found the full review on www.powells.com/review/2003_07_03.html - 89k or on Google labelled as “Powell’s Books - Review-a-day - The Future of Freedom by Fareed . . .”
Posted by: Hugh | April 16th, 2007 at 11:36 am | Report this commentI swear I don’t usually do this. This is the first time I have written into a blog. Usually I just write directly to the writer.
This was a good idea, but the execution needs polishing. For both the Kagan and Crook reviews, I had to do a fair amount of digging beyond the instructions/links given in the article. I presume there are copyright problems, but the FT to FT.com to links chain needs to be more tightly edited.
It was, however, worth it to me just to read the Keillor, Kagan and Taiibbi reviews.
Posted by: Hugh | April 16th, 2007 at 11:49 am | Report this commentAny other way to access the Clive Crook review from The Economist without a subscription?
Posted by: Tony | April 16th, 2007 at 2:13 pm | Report this commentApologies to people who have had trouble with the links - and thanks to Hugh for providing a better link to the Kagan. I had not realised that people would hit a subscription barrier with the Crook review in The Economist…I’m not sure whether copyright rules allow me to put the whole thing up. But anyway, here are a couple of paragraphs:
“The book’s other 225 pages are chiefly concerned with “reflexivity”, the concept that Mr Soros sees as his contribution to western thought. He is not immodest about this; he acknowledges his debt to Popper and says he found Kant, though backward, quite stimulating. He sagely concedes that it is not necessary to reject the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment altogether, but fears that substantial reconstruction will be needed.
What is this paradigm-smashing doctrine? “The Alchemy of Finance” gave readers a first immersion in reflexivity; now the theory is recapitulated and extended from financial markets, where it began, to politics, life and the universe. To anticipate Mr Soros’s next book, here is the principle in its most general form. Let x be any human activity: then perceptions of x affect x, and (wait for it) x affects perceptions of x. Here is a challenge for some future Quantum Research Fellow of Soros Studies: find anybody who ever denied it.”
I posted it because it’s a good piece of writing, rather than to advertise Clive’s arrival. He is perfectly capable of doing that himself, in due course. (I’m sorry, incidentally, that you didn’t like the Keillor - I still think it’s great; particularly the paragraph on rhetorical questions.
And finally somebody sent me an e-mail asking why everybody from The Economist was leaving and joining the FT. I deleted the email by accident, so I will reply in this rather more public forum. The answer is - they’re not. There has always been a fair amount of traffic in either direction between two similar publications. Clive and I are two recent examples of ex-Economist people joining the FT - but there are at least two who have gone from the FT to The Economist over the same period. And I can think of two people who have switched over twice.
Posted by: Gideon Rachman | April 16th, 2007 at 5:21 pm | Report this commentHmm…
I’m also a fan of bad reviews, to the point where I’ve actually already read the ones you cite (actually, bad reviews of BHL or Tom Friedman I’m not sure qualify, since they both fall into the ‘fish in a barrel’ category - I know of nobody who takes either of them seriously).
The bad reviews that I personally cite when the subject comes up, are: Gore Vidal on Henry Miller, Simon Blackburn on Heidegger, and someone at (alas my search function cannot currently locate it) The New Republic on Germaine Greer’s last book but two, or so.
I think the secret of a good bad review is that it must contain lots of concrete citation, so that it is clear that the nastiness is well founded.
Posted by: Sean Matthews | April 16th, 2007 at 5:44 pm | Report this commentInre the Friedman review:One might point out to his readers that on a sphere, such as the earth,any flat surface has to be curved to the same degree that the sphere is curved. His geometry is as frail as his math.
Posted by: Jerry Clegg | April 16th, 2007 at 8:16 pm | Report this commentI can’t understand why one of the blog commenters thought Keillor wasn’t funny. (Well, they’re obviously not an American!) I laughed out loud reading Keillor, thank you, and am very glad I was not in a public place at the time.
Posted by: cf | April 17th, 2007 at 12:06 am | Report this commentthanks for the links to these interesting pieces. I’m also a fan of biting reviews; my personal favorite was a review of an economics textbook that, after specifying many bad flaws, finished with something like: “In his preface the author thanks several people for helpful comments. They should sue.”
That said, the rant on Friedman’s “World is Flat” is just about the stupidest, emptiest, most irrelevant piece of venom I have encounted in about 50 years of reading this sort of stuff. The book ain’t perfect; Friedman does pontificate; his prose doesn’t always shine — but, call that a review? Shame on Taibbi, and more shame on Rachman for including it in this otherwise worthwhile diversion.
Posted by: Joel Bergsman | April 17th, 2007 at 2:28 am | Report this commentThere would have been nothing wrong with advertising Clive Crook’s arrival. I am pleased to have found out in advance, and I look forward to reading his work. I am a big fan of the Economist’s writing (if not it’s editorial line).
His review was, by the way, an absolute gem.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 17th, 2007 at 2:00 pm | Report this commentVery interesting article.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 17th, 2007 at 6:14 pm | Report this commentBHL is certainly no Tocqueville, just a pompous media jockey that symbolizes all that is bad about French elitism. Thomas Friedman, on the other hand, is an American version of BHL, but lacking in chic and polish. Negative criticism of either is way too easy to be exciting, however, Taibbi does an excellent job in demolishing the book and author. Keillor does a far less credible job, and in my opinion is not even funny. He gets way too defensive and personal with BHL, without seeing the big picture.
Posted by: Haim | April 17th, 2007 at 8:51 pm | Report this commentFor another bad review one could look at Karen Armstrong’s review of books about Muhammad in the FT Magazine last weekend. Robert Spencer responded in style on his blog pointing out the various factual errors in her analysis.
Posted by: Tim Dieppe | May 1st, 2007 at 4:15 pm | Report this commenthttp://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016230.php
Simon Blackburn on Heidegger merely proves that Anglo-American philosophers are generally more ignorant than their Continental counterparts. As alluded to by Jerry Fodor, in an article in the LRB (Water, water’s everywhere, LRB, 21 Oct 2004), “an intelligent reading of Heidegger requires knowing more about Kant, Hegel and the Pre-Socratics than I, for one, am eager to learn.” However, the best put-down of Thomas Friedman I’ve come across is an article by John Chuckman
http://www.counterpunch.com/chuckman05022003.html
to be read in conjunction with this manifesto ‘Because We Could’ (NYT, June 4, 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/opinion/04FRIE.html?ex=1179806400&en=6ef6280f880b1c83&ei=5070
where you find Friedman in full DOD gear.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 20th, 2007 at 8:25 pm | Report this comment