Musea Art Review #14
TomHendricks474
Title: New York Times Book Review - Feb. 8, 2004
What is it? Sunday insert magazine for the New York Times Newspaper, that
reviews current books.
Technical Quality: Printing fine. Illustrations slightly above normal and
obviously the work of skilled professionals, but universally cold and unfeeling
throughout.
Innovative Quality: Mostly in the concept of being THE main source for book
reviews in the US.
Review: The NYT Book Review is perhaps the most influential publication on new
books in the country. I wanted to see how this 'bible' of book reviews had held
up. It's time to review the reviewer.
I counted 17 large full reviews, 18 medium sized reviews and 16 books with
small or capsule reviews, plus their noted best seller lists. A total of 32 big
newsprint pages. Most of the books are reviewed by authors in the same field,
some by the NYT staff.
There were similar problems in virtually all the reviews. They are written with
a first paragraph that seemed unnessessary padding, or what I termed 'intro
blather'. Ex. "Have you ever been squirted by a vinegaroon?" first line from
"For Love of Insects". The reviews were too long and rambling.
Ex. "My Prison Without Bars" autobio of Pete Rose. Reviewers often talked too
much about ideas in the books and not enough about the books - as if they were
preaching an agenda with an axe to grind, or standing on a soapbox. Ex. The 3
bios of Martin Luther King. In fiction they gave away too much of the plot. Ex.
"Loving Che". There is a noticable liberal slant to all the reviews that
hinders the fairness of the reviews of political books. Ex. "An End to Evil,
How to Win the War on Terror".
Though all the reviews talked about the ideas or plot in the books, hardly a
single one talked about or quoted from, the writing style - let alone
discussing the illustrations, book jacket, the level of bookmaking. And
absolutely not a single mention of the outrageous prices of these books:
$22.95, $23.95, $24.95, $25.95,$27.95.
The Review carries ads fromthe major publishers and there is always some
concern that they may influence the reviews of books by those publishers. Ads
have no place in review magazines.
The children's book section showed samples of book illustrations which was a
welcome relief to the other cold illustrations. But all the reviews here were
puff pieces too, and the reader can't tell the quality of one from the other
when they are all praised alike.
There were no reviews outside of the mainstream. There was no mention of zines
at all. This would suggest an isolated staff unfamiliar with the vast amount
of literary achievement outside of NYC. And that is best exemplified in this
real -
and I'm not making it up - quote from Lisa Zeidner's review of, "Apprentice to
the Flower Poet Z." a novel about a poet in the 80's with a personal
assistant! .: "But writers lucky enough to have university appointments could
avoid carpal tunnel syndrome by signing on pert young assistants who not ony
eased the burden of poetry production but served as personal shoppers and
occasional therapists." Could anyone that supposedly loves books and is aware
of what is going on in
the real world of literature, say this with a straight face? How isolated and
stuck in an ivory tower can one novel and its reviewer get? A reality check is
needed badly.
And most damaging of all is that all of the 51 major reviews were soft and
promoted books that didn't seem very worthy; with 1 exception - "Madras on
Rainy Days", a mystery that the reviewer satirized: "Rife with gothic plot
twists"; but even in this review the reviewer never could bring herself to
openly say it was bad!
Also I looked at the noted, and often cited, Best Sellers list. The fine print
talking about their process of ranking the books, says "...statistically
weighted to represent all such outlest nationwide." That is suspect in my
book, and allows for a lot of
fudge factor that is outside of real statitstics. The music business had this
same problem and had to switch to a fairer model. Perhaps the NYTBR should do
the same.
Overall I found these to be shallow books with slight reviews. And most
damaging of all is this. I'm a great lover of every aspect of books. After
reading this from cover to cover, there was not a single book, reviewed that I
wanted to read. Something is very wrong here.
Contact Info: bo...@nytimes.com
nytimes.com/book
Overall Grade: 2.1 out of 10.0
Grading system: 9-10 Highest grade - Life's work of a master (ex. Collected
plays of Shakespeare, collected symphonies of Beethoven) 8-9 Single best work
of a celebrated master's career. 7-8. Best work of an era or genre or decade.
6-7 Best work of the year. 5-6 Very good. 4-5 More good than bad. 3-4 Average
amount of good = amount of bad. 2-3 Mostly bad with some redeeming parts. 1-2
Nothing redeemable. 0-1 So bad it is offensively bad and outrages the reviewere
for taking up that time in his life - just awful.
Musea guarantees a review for all art work in any conceivable field IF you
follow the rules posted on alt.zines or see our website or e-mail me.
Tom Hendricks tomhend...@cs.com
http://musea.digitalchainsaw.com