This past weekend's New York Times Book Review has a fascinating article on the diminishing art of the litarary feud. The argument runs that they are less frequent, less interesting, and less prominent than they once were, and that compared to their peers in the UK, American writers don't see getting themselves embroiled in such public spats to be worth their while.
This got me thinking about historians and other nonfiction writers. This past weekend at the Southern's meeting in Birmingham I had a conversation with a very distinguished historian who recently wrote a review in one of the most prominent weekly newspaper book review sections in the country of a book that I happen to be reviewing currently. "I was probably nicer to it than I should have been," he told me conspiratorially. I understood him completely. In my own work, I tend to write a lot of book reviews, and while I have written a couple that could pass as ruthless, on the whole I either try to find strengths in the books I review or at least I downplay their weaknesses. In some cases, such as in a review essay, the best way to address a disappointing book is to discuss the work in passing and make the essay about the topic as a whole.
But there is one area in which historians, at least, tend not to listen to the better angels of their natures. That area is the anonymous reader's report. In theory (and only in theory) the academic review process is double blind; that is, the author of the work does not know the name of the reviewer(s) and the reviewers are not supposed to know the names of the author. This second half of the equation rarely happens in practice. I have received more than my share of reader's reports that used my name: "Catsam has produced a __________ work," things like that. Except where I have done detective work, however, I have never known the names of my readers, positive or negative.
This is where the problems arise. I have had my work reviewed enough times to know that while I am probably not the most gifted of my generation of historians, I produce reasonably good, readable work. I've read enough reviews, positive, negative, and lukewarm to have a pretty good sense of when a reader is grinding an axe, has missed the point, or is simply an irascible jerk. In the anonymous review process the very person whose identity ought to be protected -- the author's -- is usually either well known or a poorly kept secret; meanwhile the very person for whom anonymity only protects responsibility -- the reader -- is protected to say any damned fool thing. This system, not surprisingly, tends to produce reader's reports the tone of which are out of all proportion to the alleged sins any author might have committed.
One of the problems with the supposedly double-blind review process is that it gives the reader too much power. It is as simple as that. Even the most senior reader is likely not as much of an expert on the precise topic that is the subject of the article or book under review as the writer, and yet anonymity protects the reader to make brazen assertions about a writer's work that might actually be debateable. And if the assertions are debateable, don't those views deserve a public hearing? More importantly, shouldn't the author get to know who is casting the criticism? I am a big fan of opening up the process -- of removing anonymity and of giving writers a chance to respond to reader's reports before the revision process.
I have learned a great number of lessons from this process, however, beyond the fact that lots of academics are jerks who write things under the cover of anonymity that would almost assuredly earn them a smack to the teeth if said in public in the same tone and with the same dismissiveness as appears in their reviews. I am on the editorial board of a couple of small journals, and have begun to be asked to review larger projects by some presses, and having been on both sides of both positive and negative reports, I have drawn a few lessons from the process that I hope makes me less of a jerk than I might otherwise be. I'd like to think these rules are fairly widely applicable.:
1) Tone it down, killer. Only a very small number of people will be reading these things -- oftentimes as few as three -- you, the editor, and the author. There is no sense going on the warpath. No one is going to be impressed by the rigor of your written assaults -- you are not the star of this show, even if you have been granted the capacity to be the gatekeeper.
2) The point is to approve, reject, or ask for revisions. If you plan to do either the first or the second, you do not have to say that much. If you find that a work is truly bad, you can simply reject it without comment, or say a few things about a couple of areas where the shortcomings need a lot of work. Most submissions fall into the third area. If you want someone to revise and resubmit, constructive criticism is the only contribution that is needed from you. Chennelling your inner dickhead just gets in the way.
3) Know what you don't know. I made this point above, but the odds are that the author knows more about their topic, usually by a long way, than you do. This holds even if you are a senior person or an "expert in the field." So a little humility is in order. In a particularly galling reader's report I received a couple of years back, the reader was outraged that I did not consult an archival source that does not exist; was galled that I did not look at the reports of journalists who were not there; corrected facts that were not wrong. A little humility on the part of this writer might have both tempered their displeasure with my manuscript and might well have helped me to make undoubtedly necessary improvements to make the work better -- which really should be the point. (By the way -- I had my moment when Michael Corleone discovers in Cuba that Fredo has betrayed him with this same reader, who actually has a reputation for eviscerating much of what he reads, to the point where at least two prominent presses no lonmger will use him.)
4) Along these lines, know that you simply might be wrong. Nothing is more galling than receiving three different and widely varying reports as I did recently from a highly respected journal: Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions, and reject unconditionally. Despite the fact that the journal's editors disagreed with the person who said to reject unconditionally, they included that report, and it inevitably made me mad but also, and I don't want to sound too pathetic here, it did what these sorts of reports inevitably do: it made me feel like crap about myself, about my work, and about a project I spent quite a lot of time working on. And yet two other readers, presumably equal in status to the first, did not see the piece as worthless. In other words, among experts in the field, the person was quite possibly wrong.
5) Related to this last point, remember that there is a person on the other side of your withering evaluation. And that more than likely, this person is not your enemy. Seriously -- as important as history is, it's still just a journal article or book destined to be looked at by, well, maybe hundreds of people. You are not slaying dragons here. You are not saving the world from evil. You are simply helping to decide the fate of a paper. And in this endeavor, you might be fallible.
And to toot my own horn a little bit, for one of these journals for which I am on the editorial board, among several senior people whose work I respect very much, I am developing a reputation for being the most reliable, scrupulous, and fair reviewer they use on a regular basis. (At least the editor of the journal told me as much. maybe he says that to all of the girls.) I follow my own rules, I really try not to be a jerk, I know the process is not about me, I understand that even work I do not think is ready for prime time was produced by a person who both has feelings and who knows a lot more than I about some things in this field, and in the end I really do try not to say anything that I would not say to someone sitting across from me at a bar. There is a time and a place to drop the gloves. The anonymous review process is not that place.
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