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