Brutality in Book Reviews

Brutality in Book Reviews:

It's a fine art, using the review to destroy someone's work. Of course, sometimes their work is of a character that destroying it is a necessary exercise in hygiene. If a reviewer notices bad behavior, they have the chance to cut off the harm before it can infect a field of thinking.

Of course, if the reviewer is the bad actor, one who knows that a book raises troubling questions that will undermine their own position in the overarching discipline. They can attempt to quash a book whose thesis is problematic for them by suggesting that no one should even bother to read it. The hope, then, is that no one will.

In either case such reviews can be a lot of fun to read; almost as much fun as British obituaries. It is important to be able to distinguish between attempts at hygiene, and attempts at assassination.

Two reviews of the brutal type have come across my screen recently. One of them is over a work of politics; the other, a work of history.

Politics:

On June 20, 2002, the United States Supreme Court decreed, in the case of Atkins v. Virginia, that the mildly mentally retarded were categorically exempt from capital punishment, reasoning that fully functional adults of diminished mental capacity were as a matter of law not as culpable for their acts. Writing eloquently in dissent, Justice Scalia drew a sharp distinction between the severely mentally retarded (who are truly not responsible for their actions), and the merely stupid (the category into which Mr. Atkins undoubtedly fell). Scalia argued forcefully that, with respect to the merely stupid, at least sometimes they deserve to be punished for their antisocial and destructive behavior.

This article, of course, is not about capital punishment. It is a book review of Dirty, Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain. However, the above discussion is relevant because I initially had reservations about writing this book review at all....

Either this book had no editor, or the editor assigned to the original manuscript threw up his or her hands three pages in and decided to let the original stand as some sort of bizarre performance art....

Meghan has a troubling habit of putting sentences and thoughts together as though they flow in some sort of linear train of thought, when in fact they have nothing to do with one another....

Were this a book from any other author, I might at this point be lamenting the fact that the author had an important message that would sadly be lost due to her horrible communication skills. Not so with Meghan McCain....

Dirty, Sexy Politics is 194 pages long; if you removed the descriptions of outfits and hairstyles so-and-so wore when such-and-such was going on, I doubt it would have scraped 120 pages.

History:

There is too much here that is just simply wrong. Authors and texts are assigned to the wrong century (Hildegard of Bingen is swept back to the 11th century and Jean de Meun's sexual allegory of the Roman de la Rose is flung forward a century beyond Thomas Aquinas to be read as some kind of antidote to his theological summa)....

Women did not write: what a slap in the face for the past three decades of medievalist feminist research which has carefully unearthed the works not just of individual brilliant women writers, but entire female monastic communities of authors and scribes. Indeed, Fossier may have a medievalist feminist revolt on his hands with his description of the iconic female political, poetic and didactic author Christine de Pizan as one of the vindictive ladies of the court....

...footnotes... there are none....

For the reader who finds my critique harsh, it is in fact the opinion of the author himself who confesses that "It is useless to accuse me of mixing up centuries, of being content with simplistic generalisations, of eliminating nuances of time or place, of using deceptive words and impure sources. I know all this and assume responsibility for it."

For discussion, two questions:

1) Which review is more damaging to the book?

2) In each case, do you take the review to be an act of proper hygiene, or an act of assassination?