"A New American Book Review?"

TNR Online has a fascinating discussion from various contributors sparked by Jeffrey Herf's call for a new American review of books.  Herf argues that "most of our major book reviews are failing to inform a non-specialist but sophisticated audience about American scholarship."  The Times doesn't have the space or time or, often, inclination.  TNR does a good job but lacks the space to do very much of it.  The New York Review of Books is by now "known for its leftish and left-liberal politics as much as for its serious book reviewing" -- or, to add to the NYRB pileup from another contributor to the dialogue, it "locked in an ideology from the early 1970s and gave a pulpit to a clique of alpha males from which they could impose their idiosyncratic theories and beat back new ideas they didn't like."  So Herf argues that there is room, and need, for a new book review that does a serious job of translating serious books for a serious but non-specialist audience.  I'm all in favor of this one; sign me up!  The discussion is good and interesting and worth reading.

A couple of additional thoughts.  First, one might have expected the blogosphere to fill some of this gap, since it makes low-cost publishing available rather than have to depend on a dwindling subscriber base of "sophisticated non-experts."  Maybe it has filled the gap, even if I'm not aware that it has; it's a big Net out there.  In the legal realm, though, I'm not sure this has taken place.  Of course Larry Solum does yeoman work every Saturday picking a book of the week, but these are generally notices and descriptions, not reviews.  And many of the standard lawprofblogs I read, including this one, don't do much by way of book reviewing, and then often are more likely to discuss popular press books.  When we do, the discussion often isn't that in-depth, and often is somewhat embarrassingly positive; witness the general and short-lived excitement online about Jan Crawford Greenburg's merely serviceable book.  Not to be indelicate, but I can't help but wonder whether both the tendency to focus on books published by popular presses, and the generally positive spin, have something to do with the fact that we bloggers sometimes get advance copies for free, and that the presses that are most active in sending us these copies tend to be the popular presses.  I admit that I would like to see the university presses, which generally send out fewer review copies, be more active in sending forthcoming academic books to lawblogs like this one, where these books might be previewed and discussed for a generally relevant, interested, and select audience.  Of course, given what I've said, we should then assume a corresponding obligation to actually provide a good read and thoughtful discussion of these books, rather than sticking them on our shelves and providing a cursory ten-word blurb on the blog.  One may also hope that we could then draw the authors into the discussion.  Of course, there are examples of this; witness the discussion of Covering by various folks, including the author, on this blog last year.  (But note that Covering itself was a popular press book.)  Let's see some more of it.

Second, if you're looking for thoughtful discussions of academic books that are at least somewhat translated to reach a sophisticated but sometimes non-expert audience, let me stick up for that battered old institution: the law review.  It can be no secret that the back-of-the-book writing in law reviews is often sharper, more direct and less bloated than the extended tenure pieces at the front of the book, and we have book reviews in large measure to thank for this.  (Along with the slowly growing rise of the "essay.")  They are not a substitute for the book itself (are they?), but they are often an excellent and economical presentation of the views of the reviewer, and are often the best sheer reading in the issue.