The Culture of Books and Reviewing

Over at The New Republic James Walcott reviews Gail Pool's new book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. This probably seems like one of those discussions that only effete snobs and pointy-headed intellectuals care about. And maybe it is. But effete snobs and pointy-headed intellectuals are not always wrong and more often than those who castigate them would like to believe, are quite often right. I don't think that it creates a mythologized or idealized past to argue that there was once a more vibrant culture of books and book reviewing in the United States and that now as much as ever there are the means and mechanisms to have such a culture again but that there seems not to be the will and the desire.