The Life and Death of the Book Review

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” because book reviewers had turned into “Visigoths,” “critical torturers” who took “malicious pleasure” in tearing authors apart. A century and a half later, in the very first issue of The New Republic, Rebecca West was sounding an equally pessimistic note, although for opposite reasons: “There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation . . . a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger.” And in 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick famously said much the same thing about reviewing in the United States: “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.” But now book reviewing faces more serious threats than blandness. I first started to worry about it sixteen years ago, thanks to one of those minor academic scandals that generate such malign delight among British literary people. Orlando Figes, a prominent historian of Russia, was discovered to have posted under a pseudonym favorable reviews of his own books on Amazon, and to have rubbished the books of rivals. A feeding frenzy followed in the upscale British dailies, with one of the rivals, Robert Service, calling Figes’ actions “contaminant slime.” The incident cast a new and depressing light on the faux-cheery emails I was by then regularly receiving from colleagues and friends asking me, “if you feel so inclined,” to post favorable notices of their own books on Amazon. Sixteen years on, Amazon controls over half the American book market, and its user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism. I will admit to checking my own Amazon reviews from time to time. One of them gives my book The First Total War just one lonely star. It reads, in its entirety: “to be frank a boring book.” Another one-star review, this time for my Napoleon: A Concise Biography, is worrisomely titled “a hopeless situation,” but turns out to be a complaint that Amazon overcharged the purchaser. I am happier with the reviewer who gives Napoleon a much-coveted five-star notice. “I enjoyed reading this book,” he writes. “Lots of history.” Well, yes. The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics, instead taking their lead from celebrities like Oprah, or online influencers. The authoritative middlebrow cultural figures who once instructed Americans on what to read from perches at the Saturday Review and the New Yorker no longer exist (Adam Gopnik does not dictate American reading habits). The very idea of such cultural authority is widely dismissed as elitist. Meanwhile, mainstream venues for book reviewing continue their long-running magical disappearing act, with falling subscriptions and ad revenues acting as financial Ozempic on their budgets and page counts. The New Republic and the Nation, for instance, used to publish weekly, and included four or five excellent and carefully crafted reviews in each issue. Now they are each down to ten issues a year, with perhaps five or six reviews in each. In February of this year, as part of his evisceration of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos killed its book section, leaving the New York Times as the only major American newspaper with a stand-alone weekly book review. And the Times’ book coverage is not exactly adventurous or comprehensive. It overwhelmingly favors famous authors and the “big five” publishers whose ads appear in its pages. In 2024, eight of its “ten best” books of the year came from a single press: Penguin Random House. Two years earlier, of the sixteen history titles that made its “hundred best,” no fewer than ten likewise came from Penguin Random House — and not a single one from a university press. The novelist Reynolds Price noted in his memoir Ardent Spirits that in the 1960s, even a first novel might get as many as 90 reviews in American and British newspapers. Today, a hopeful debutant author would be very lucky to get five. Newer online-only publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books have picked up some of the slack, sometimes running terrific reviews. But they suffer from a problem that afflicts nearly all online publishing. One of the most important functions of a review is to alert readers to the existence of books they might not have an obvious interest in. Paper publications provide this experience naturally, thanks to those ultra-sophisticated search technologies known as “tables of contents” and “flipping pages.” But readers mostly come to online reviews from links in social media or email, with the all-powerful algorithms efficiently directing them to topics they were already curious about and authors they already knew. Often they do not even notice the name of the publication. Of course, they could navigate to the publications’ home pages, but relatively few readers do this, and emailed tables of contents, even if they escape the spam filters, usually end up lost in the ever-flowing mudslides of our inboxes. The decline of the book review might seem like a minor tragedy, compared to all the other tragedies afflicting us at present. Yet it is symptomatic of a larger change. The modern book review was born with the Enlightenment and it expressed key Enlightenment values: a commitment to the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, free of censorship; a belief in open, passionate, critical debate; and, above all, a dedication to making the results of this exploration and debate accessible to a broad general public. It is no coincidence that the book review, as a cultural phenomenon, is in steep decline, at the moment when the last gleams of the Enlightenment itself increasingly recall the unsteady flickers of a guttering candle. BC