From the Editors: Reviewing Views

As anyone who peruses the pages of history journals is probably aware, many book reviews are not terribly satisfying. They are formulaic, bland, and not very critical (or, less often, needlessly critical). The primary reason for the poverty of reviews is rather mundane – they are too short. Six hundred or even 1,000 words is simply not sufficient to allow scholars to carefully consider the range of subjects that must be covered for rich, thought-provoking analysis. The short review is an impossible genre, a destructive battle between brevity and understanding. Reviewers know this, and frequently feel frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary word-limits imposed on them by journal editors (who, naturally, are under constraints of their own). One of the stated aims of Kritika is to improve the standard of book reviews in Russian and Eurasian history by offering authors the space they need to give books (and particularly rarely-reviewed books in languages other than English) the detailed treatment their authors deserve and the scholarly community demands.

Yet it must be said that additional length alone will not raise the standard of book reviewing in the field. For, on deeper inspection, it is clear that there are other, less obvious forces that diminish the quality of reviews. On the most general level, one might point to what could be called the "culture of criticism," particularly in American academia, but also elsewhere. Like any set of mental habits, this culture has rules.

Some are formal, that is, having to do with the literary template used to construct reviews. Most reviews (particularly short ones) follow a tried and true formula: summary, discussion, critique, praise. Each segment of the formulaic review boasts its own clichés: "This work is a fundamental contribution to …"; "The author is to be praised for …"; "It would have been desirable to …," and so on. Certainly, a common vocabulary is necessary for any scholarly enterprise, but the use of this formula and its cookie-cutter components can have a dulling effect on reviews. No doubt, they make it easier for reviewers to write reviews. In a short review, the critique – that is, the part that involves real thought – can be as short as a paragraph or a few sentences. The rest is simple. It is equally certain that the formula makes it easier for readers to read reviews – one knows just what to expect around every corner. But a formula is a formula, and not a very good vessel for subtlety or critical thinking.

It is not the template alone that diminishes the quality of reviews. Rather, it is the Manichaean mentality that accompanies it, one that sharply divides reviews into two categories, "positive" and "negative." How many times have we all had the following conversation:

Professor A: "Did you see the review of X's book by Y?

Professor B: "Yes, it was quite negative."

We are all guilty of speaking as if a scholar's life work were a cineplex movie that could be given "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." The short review, and the pattern upon which it is written, make these sorts of judgements easy. A formulaic review can be quickly scanned for telling adjectives – "ambitious," "seminal," "path-breaking" – to determine whether the reviewer "liked" or "disliked" the book. The formula is so generic that experienced readers can often predict where the telling adjectives will occur – usually in the last paragraph right before the short "praise" section – making it unnecessary to read the entire review (if, that is, one merely wants to extract the verdict).

There is, of course, a cynical presumption behind the "good-bad" way of speaking about reviews, namely, that the reviewer was hiding what he or she truly believed about the book in stilted, formulaic language. Again, it must be admitted that this is often the case. And here we come to the heart of the problem with our culture of criticism: the institutional and inter-personal realities of academia have a chilling effect on freedom of criticism in book reviews. In today's intellectual climate, no one wants to write a "bad" review, for "bad" reviews often have uncomfortable consequences...