Gotham Diary:
Whither the Book Review?
30 April 2013

¶ Michael Wolff, writing in The Guardian, foresees a merger of the New York Times Book Review with the newspaper’s recently-revamped Sunday Review. The occasion for this gloomy prediction is the appointment of Pamela Paul as editor. (via Arts  Journal)

The new editor is Pamela Paul, and quite unlike any before her. (I believe I can reel off all of them from the mid-seventies on without any effort … the columnist and reviewer John Leonard; the poet and editor Harvey Shapiro; one of the big newsroom bosses, Mike Levitas; followed by Times heavy, Rebecca Sinkler; then former New Yorker editor, Charles (Chip) McGrath; then Vanity Fair writer and Whitaker Chambers biographer Sam Tanenhaus.)

Paul has, pretty much, no writerly or literary credentials. She’s written some straightforward, but non-literary nonfiction – a book about marriage, a book about parenting, and a book condemning pornography – and she’s been the children’s book editor at the Book Review for a short time. Her resume includes two years as a blogger at the Huffington Post, which, it doesn’t seem entirely churlish to point out, is not a job, and a stint writing a column for the Times’ Style section.

But the vitality of the Book Review has been draining for many years now. Most reviews are blandly predictable, and enthusiasm is rare. Even long pieces have become oddly weightless. So long as the Book Review continues to be published, I’ll want to give it a glance, but I won’t miss it when it disappears, the victim of complete mission failure.

The one and only purpose of a book review is to promote the sale of books in a creditable manner. This means pitching reviews toward readers who may be expected to like the books when they read them, and away from those who won’t, and at a brief length that will not enable those who don’t read books to appear as if they do.

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