The Art of the Review

Don Herzog* April, 2024

What’s a book review for?

You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast. Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to mention committee hearings, and passing new statutes, the latter apparently written by Bulgarian bureaucrats struggling in their fifth semester of English as a second language. Don’t get me started on what the agencies are up to. (Quick! how many pages were added to the Federal Register while you read this paragraph?) Especially if you fear that some books should have been articles and that most law review articles are too long, you can be forgiven for basking in deep and abiding gratitude to the reviewer who boils things down. If you’re the tiniest bit unscrupulous, you can then pretend to have read the book yourself. You can even cite it, though I hope you have enough of a scholarly conscience left to feel uneasy about that morsel of cheating. (I hope too that “scholarly conscience” is not an oxymoron.) And you can be baffled or annoyed—I am—by the kinds of “reviews” that sometimes appear in, oh, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where the ostensible reviewer can barely be bothered to mention the book she’s allegedly reviewing, but just wants to tell you what she would have said had she written a book on the topic.

But book reviews aren’t CliffsNotes. Certainly this law review does not ask each reviewer to offer a flatfooted, sorry, stenographic, sorry, impartial condensed version of the book. When you review a book, you are offering something more like a brief than a memo. Everybody knows that.

So you might think the point of a review is to tell you how good, bad, or indifferent a book is. But that doesn’t require all those words. The law review could instruct reviewers in that tendentious device some social scientists adore, the feeling thermometer. “On a scale from 1 to 100,” they could say, “how good is this book?” Or, since we’re imagining something dumb, let’s make it dumber: “ . . . How much do you like this book?” (Don’t make me cringe by claiming those two questions are the same.) Or they could print an outstretched thumb, pointed anywhere between straight up and straight down. They could review a lot more books that way, too. But then you’d also wonder why a single reviewer’s verdict counts. The law review could solicit lots of thumb appraisals for every book it reviews. This issue could be page after page of book titles, each accompanied by lots of pictures of thumbs pointing this way and that. Or maybe a mean/median/mode thumb, with some statistics in one of those dreary long footnotes that law reviews—alas, even this one—seem somehow to devote themselves to ecstatically. Would you still pick it up?

Is a book review something like CliffsNotes plus a thumb? When you were in middle school, you wrote book reports. (I hope you did, anyway.) The book report is CliffsNotes plus a thumb, a summary of the book followed by some evaluation—no, a vacuous statement of preference. “I really liked this book.” “I found this book perplexing.” “I had to prop my eyelids open with a toothpick to finish this book.” But a book report is not a book review.

Siskel & Ebert famously offered thumbs. And maybe, if you trusted their judgment, you could decide whether to see a movie by consulting their thumbs. But the thumb gimmick wasn’t what made them renowned reviewers. That fame depended on how earnestly they argued with one another about the movie—not just what was good, bad, or indifferent about it but also what was distinctive; how it tweaked or subverted or advanced or just followed its genre; what we should make of the writing, the acting, the cinematography . . . . It wouldn’t be a waste of your time to watch a Siskel & Ebert review after you saw the movie. And one hopes it wouldn’t be a waste of time for those who actually made the film to watch Siskel & Ebert in action, either.

So yes, you can read a book review to learn something about what a book says. And you can get one person’s view of how good it is, whether it might be worth your time. (Opportunity cost alert: Think of how many more pages have been added to the Federal Register now that you’re several more paragraphs into this piece.) But what you want, I think, what you should want, what reviewers aspire to (more or less consciously), is to see people joined in argument: the author(s) of the book and the reviewer.

Should, must, a reviewer offer objections? All to the good, if it helps the reviewer engage, to explore roads not taken, equivocations masked over by sloppy writing or thinking, and the like. Not particularly interesting if the reviewer is playing implacable Javert tracking down errors for the sake of it; even worse if the reviewer is just rattling off particular points she disagrees with. (The only books I never disagree with are those blank journals they sell, before anyone writes in them.) You should catalogue errors if and only if they reveal something deeper about the book: That it is, for instance, so sloppy with source materials that you have to warn the reader, abandon trust all ye who enter here.¹

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For years, I served as the book review editor for the journal Political Theory, which had and has some disputed claim to be the flagship journal of the field. The journal publishes six smallish issues a year. The typical issue has two or three brief reviews; sometimes there are review essays that cluster a few books together. My impression, and no I am not going to crunch any numbers, is that political theorists write books much more often than law professors do. So real estate in the review pages of Political Theory is scarce and coveted terrain.

And the books! They kept landing on my desk, day after day, week after week. (University presses aren’t devoted to promoting what they publish. They design and price a lot of books as monographs, figuring they’ll sell several hundred copies to university libraries, maybe a few to the author’s doting mother and dutiful friends. Class, can you say “death spiral”? Library budgets are cratering, central administration’s subsidies to university presses are drying up, the prices of the books are climbing to ever more stratospheric heights . . . . Still, those presses manage sometimes, more than often enough from a battle-fatigued editor’s point of view, to send out some review copies.) So I had to figure out what was worth reviewing. And I had to figure out who should review it.

It never occurred to me that the latest work of poohbahs should be reviewed simply because they were poohbahs. You might think their august status gave me some reason to believe their latest work would probably be good. But I have my doubts about how closely professional status tracks quality of work, and sometimes I thought poohbahs were aimlessly coasting or recycling their earlier work. I have always rallied to a classic claim about the republic of letters: that all that matters is the merits of one’s argument, not one’s status. Repressing the temptation to open a fire hydrant, I’ll offer just one satisfying thimbleful, from 1798: “The advantages of rank or fortune[] are no advantages in argumentation; neither is an inferior to offer, or a superior to extort the submission of the understanding on such occasions; for every man’s reason has the same pedigree; it begins and ends with himself.”² But I confess that I did pay a bit of attention to status. At some margin I chose to commission reviews of the work of young people at less prestigious institutions.

Some poohbahs were decidedly unamused. I will never forget the tone of voice—I have a more vivid memory of that than I do of precisely what words came sputtering out of my phone’s earpiece—with which a Famous Theorist upbraided me for not reviewing their book. Their tone was indignant, but also condescending; baffled, but also serene. Mostly, it was the tone of someone reproving me for not understanding how the game is played. Books by famous people, the claim went, were obviously worth reviewing. Not, it turned out, because epistemically it was prudent to assume those books would be interesting, but just because they were written by famous people.

These bizarre rules of the game, I learned, were allegedly underwritten by tit-for-tat vengeance: Famous Theorist growled that they could ensure my next book didn’t get reviewed anywhere. (No, they couldn’t really do that. Always remember that the problem with conspiracy theories is not that the authorities are fair or benevolent; it’s that the world is too complicated, too contingent, for elaborate string-pulling exercises to succeed.) I patiently reminded FT that the journal’s book review pages were a perilously scarce resource, to no avail. The call ended with some considerable consternation, on their end anyway. Usually I hate conflict, but the call didn’t bother me. I found it darkly entertaining. As I did the sequel: FT contacted the editor-in-chief to demand that I be fired. The editor-in-chief was of course the person who’d asked me to assume this role, and she declined. (Later she told me that she was proud of herself for not giggling.) I heard no more of the matter.

Poohbahs have even defended the claim that the rules of the game should dictate that we pay attention to status, not only to the merits of the argument. Stanley Fish once inveighed against blind submission, that is the practice by which journals and presses scrub a manuscript of everything identifying the author before sending it out for peer review. Fish thought all such efforts were patently misconceived. Not because the peer reviewer wouldn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to figure out who the author was. (Think: prose style. Think: prior work. Think: rumor mill.) Rather because the idea of cordoning off merit from professional status is absurd and incoherent: “[M]erit is inseparable from the structure of the profession and therefore the fact that someone occupies a certain position in that structure cannot be irrelevant to the assessment of what he or she produces.”³ Um, that’s wrong. But I won’t explain why it’s wrong. No, I don’t expect you to take my word for it. Nor do I intend to commit the ad hominem fallacy by reporting that Fish adds, “I am against blind submission because the fact that my name is attached to an article greatly increases its chances of getting accepted.”⁴ Insert deep sigh here.

Likewise, as an editor I never thought it was my business to make sure a book got a positive or a negative review. I tried to choose a reviewer who’d have an interesting take on the book—who’d enrich readers’ understanding of the book, the topic, the intellectual strategy of attack and its promises and perils, and so on—even, again, who’d enrich the author’s understanding of their own work. That stance too got me scolded, and here I do have an unhappily concrete memory of particular words uttered with plaintive incredulity: “You didn’t get my book a positive review!” Or again: Another Famous Theorist once sternly instructed me that I should have rejected a review of their work and gotten a different one instead. I reminded this FT that I invited people to write these reviews, and as long as they surfaced something plausibly called a review, I couldn’t very well reject them, though I often offered comments on draft reviews for the reviewers to think about. (No, not to nudge them toward my view.) But, FT objected, this review was negative! It sure was, but, poor innocent editor that I was, I couldn’t see why that was relevant.

As a reviewer, and not an editor, I have departed from the severe egalitarian logic of the republic of letters in another way. I have punched up, as we say, but never down. I have written some take-no-prisoners reviews, not because I had any antipathy to the authors—that would obviously be ridiculous; a book review is not an opportunity to work out some personal pique—nor because I thought they shouldn’t have such fancy jobs. I’ve done it when I think a book is confused in ways that matter, that it exemplifies confusions that haunt the field. But I can’t imagine shredding the work of a relatively young person at a school lower down in the vexed and vexing status hierarchy. In such cases, I’ve thought, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything.

Occasionally book review editors have asked me who should review my own work. I demur, because I shouldn’t have a say. Pressed, I choose people I think would have an interesting take. I haven’t chosen friends, or people I’m confident would bubble over about how good my work is. I don’t think that stance is saintly and I don’t think it’s naïve. But my ego boundaries don’t include my books. I like some of my books well enough, and I hope others like wrestling with them. And, sure, if a book of mine elicits thumbs-up, it is likelier at some margin that others will read it. That’s a good thing: One doesn’t write to have one’s work gather dust on library shelves. But once the book is out in the world, it’s just grist for the mill of academic discussion. I don’t mind when reviewers dislike my work. I mind when they seem not to have gotten it—not because their CliffsNotes summary won’t be accurate, though there’s room to worry about whether a reviewer has been conscientious enough to actually read the damned book. Rather because they won’t enrich the reader’s grasp of the issues. Or mine.

Here’s a bit of advice for authors. (The advice is free, so don’t complain if it sounds smarmy.) Don’t wince, don’t rejoice, when you learn your book is being reviewed—or when you read the review. Cultivate some Stoic indifference and watch as the profession blunders, sprints, and lumbers its way to deepening our understanding of law.

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Plenty of law reviews never run book reviews. This one has been running a special book review issue for a long time. (I would like at least a forlorn cheer, thank you very much, when I tell you that I am not going to let the tireless law review editors track down just how many years it’s been, stick the number in, and drop the inevitable footnote. My qualitative phrase makes the point I want more precisely.) The issue is rightly a must-read for many in the profession. Sure, some want a quick summary of what some book or other says. And others want to know what individual reviewers thought was and wasn’t worth reading. But most of us, I think, want to see argument joined. We want to read reviews that tell us something about how to think about the topic. And we want in turn, if silently, to join argument with reviewer and author. In the best reading group I ever joined, we’d read books and two or three reviews, and then meet to discuss the lot.

Every year, the book review issue doesn’t just happen to bundle individual reviews together. With its luxuriant hundreds of pages, territory I never had to populate when I was book review editor, it gives you a sense of the breadth and depth of what law professors have recently been doing. It’s worth your time to read reviews of books not in your area, to get a capacious sense of what our corner of the academic world is up to—to think about what we do well and what we do badly, or what we don’t do at all. That last might even suggest an unexplored topic, a new and promising strategy of attack, a book you could write. Have at it.

* Don Herzog teaches law and political theory at the University of Michigan. He has written more book reviews than he wants to think about just now.