YOU ARE HERE: > New Books
Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America by Gail Pool ’67
University of Missouri Press / 192 pages
Book reviewing has been around for as long as there have been books—or almost, Gail Pool points out in this absorbing assessment of the craft, which includes a brief history as well. Not until printing technology and the publishing industry matured in the early eighteenth century did the book reviewer appear on the literary scene. But where was that reviewer to stand? Dependent on the industry itself for publication, the reviewer struggled to maintain independence of judgment and, perhaps more important, just to get by. Pool quotes an early Idler essay: “Reviewing work is too badly paid for any reasonable being to think of making it either an art or a business.” We feel for the starving artist, but what about the starving book reviewer?
Today, there are few who, like Pool, persist in the profession long enough to have a hand in establishing critical standards. All too many reviewers are in the game for their own shortsighted purposes—to promote a recent book, to achieve name recognition, to advance a friend’s career. But Pool is not one to blame the messenger; her analysis is as wide-ranging as it is hard-hitting. Faint Praise is a brave polemic, written out of a profound love of literature, evident on every page.
