Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 10
Popular Culture Review
Those reviewers who do write critiques for a living sometimes
review as many as six to ten books a week: few professional editors
and agents can manage that schedule even if they speed read. Thus,
professional reviewers often write about books they haven't finished,
or have read hurriedly, or have merely skipped through. For both
substance and opinion, they often rely on the plot summaries and
scenarios that publishers enclose in review copies or even on other
reviews. They wouldn't confess this even under torture, perhaps, but
identical errors in summaries show up often enough in reviews to raise
suspicions about how closely some books are read. In her critique of
my own book of previously published essays on Larry McMurtry's
novels, for example, an El Paso reviewer complained that she was
amazed and not a little offended that so many articles could have
been written "by these college professors" so quickly on a writer who
had only recently won the Pulitzer Prize. Had she even glanced at
the table of contents of the volume or the Preface, she would have
noted that of the forty-plus essays included, only eight were new and
written specifically for the volume; the rest represented nearly
thirty years of criticism on McMurtry's work. Also, fewer than half
were by "college professors."
The hierarchy of periodicals which run reviews is as follows:
the trades (Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews,
etc.) which publish short but decisive recommendations as early as
two months before a book's release date; the pulpsj (daily and weekly
newspapers and their supplements); the slicks (weekly magazines);
the very slick monthlies (Esquire, Ladies’ Home Journal, Playboy,
Texas Monthly, etc.) which time their reviews in the same month as
a book's release date; and then a few special review periodicals such
as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book
R eview , the West Coast Review, or The Times Literary Supplement
which will time reviews about a week or so prior to a book's
publication date. The wire services review as well, although few
first-rate papers carry these, and when they do, they often cut them
to fit space available. There are also reviews in what might be
called "intellectual" publications such as Three Penny Review, or
Bloomsbury Review; and there are hundreds of scholarly journals
that carry essay-reviews of contemporary writing. Because these are
published quarterly or biannually and sometimes review books as