Live From BEA:
Long Live the Book Review
By Mark Rotella -- Publishers Weekly, 6/1/2007 12:23:00 PM
With book review pages shrinking and vanishing in newspapers and magazines across the country, you might think the art of the book review is dying. But the standing-room-only, NBCC-sponsored panel called "Ethics of Book Reviewing" proved otherwise. In fact, the panel, moderated by Carlin Romano, critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is one of three events this BEA focusing on the book review (Bookforum’s panel on "The Culture and History of the Book Review" was Thursday night; tomorrow there’s a panel called "The Crisis in American Book Pages").
Romano opened the discussion with questions from a survey he devised, ranging from whether one should review a book one knows he won’t like to whether it’s acceptable to review a book of a friend, acquaintance or enemy. " ‘Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,’" quipped author and critic Christopher Hitchens. "And that’s from the Book of Job." Panelist included boldface, book-page names such as Sam Tanenhaus (editor-in-chief, New York Times Book Review); David Ulin (book editor, L.A. Times); John Leonard (critic, Harper’s, New York Review of Books). No matter the differing opinions, the panelists all agreed that what’s most important is the quality of the writing of the book review itself. Or, in novelist/critic Francine Prose’s words, "the most unethical thing to do is to write about a book boringly."
