Criminal Editors

Negative reviews are an editor's bogeyman. Few things are potentially scarier than the specter of a negative review published in their journal. But just like bad dreams and bad books, negative reviews are a part of life.

In a recent conversation with fellow editors, I was taken aback when my peers adamantly argued that negative reviews should not be published. Their thought was, since so few books are reviewed compared to the total number of books published, why waste valuable review space and time reviewing bad books? Why publish a negative review when one could just as well publish a positive review of another book?

If their logic works, then our previous issue devoted to discussing bad books—which in one sense became a compendium of negative reviews—was the height of wastefulness.

And based on the vehement response to the issue in the Los Angeles Times, Guardian (UK), The New Yorker, Huffington Post, Inside Higher Education, and other media outlets, my colleagues' insights about negative reviews seem to gain credibility.

There is no doubt that publishing a negative review is more difficult than publishing a positive review. The potential discontent of the book's author, the author's friends, and the author's publisher can be intimidating. It's no wonder that most reviewers suffer from what the Greeks called akrasia, or weakness of the will, when they are faced with writing anything less than glowing about a book.

The vast majority of book reviews tend to be positive rather than negative not because there are more good books out there than bad ones, but because the possible effects of negative reviewing are much less appealing than the effects of positive reviewing. Reviewers today err toward the side of sympathy—or as Gail Pool calls it "faint praise"—in their reviews when they feel themselves reacting negatively toward a book. Some even refuse to write a review if they feel it will be negative. But do these current practices really help the cause of book reviewing? I'm not so sure.

If book reviewing is to distance itself from the perception that it is simply a promotional service for the publishing industry, then it needs to engage in legitimate practices. The task of the reviewer should not be to prejudge their reviews, but rather to be open to following them through to the natural conclusion of the aesthetic and intellectual interaction resulting from the act of reading. To write only about the fruitful ends of these readings is like a restaurant critic who only tells us about the good restaurants in which she's eaten.

While it does make sense for editors to assign to reviewers books that they have reason to believe are good books or that will have potential appeal to their readers, it does not follow from this that the reviews of these books will always be glowing. The question of what reviewers should do when they find themselves reacting negatively to a book that has been assigned to them for review though seems fairly obvious: write the review. And this negative review should be subject to the same quality protocols as a review that is positive, which is to say, if it is the result of an honest engagement with the book by a competent reviewer, then it must be published.

Or should it? A recent event is making editors wary.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that an NYU law professor is being sued for publishing a less-than-glowing review of a book on international criminal courts. The journal editor "refused to remove the review but offered to publish a reply." The book author contends that the review is libelous and harms her reputation and academic credentials. In my estimation, it is the lawsuit that will do the most harm to her reputation.

As an editor, I face both positive and negative reviews on a regular basis. The backbone of book reviewing rests on reviewers competent to handle the books they have been assigned and level of honesty regarding their responsiveness to the text before them. Reviewers with an ax to grind or...