by Linda Hirshman

Our conversation about book reviews has led me to think a little about books in general. I was especially inspired by Gawker's attack on our enterprise. (Btw, is there a Dowd key on the Gawker computer that produces that grating, snarky tone for everything?) Gawker accuses us of being concerned only about boring books from the "Ivory Tower," which the Times, busy with porn star biographies, rightly ignores. Gawker invokes the specter of reviews for such tomes as Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel's What's the Matter With Truth? Rorty may be sort of an academic rock star. Reading from the introduction to Truth, however, it is easy to identify this as a book mostly for other specialists in academic philosophy. Publishing such works is a perfectly legitimate, even the primary, role of a university press like Rorty's publisher Columbia but not, I hope, what we have in mind for a new review. I hope we will be looking for worthy, but less specialized, efforts, a middle ground between fuzzy men with large appurtenances on the one hand and Gawker's geeky Rapunzels on the other. It may be harder than we think. Looking to the university press for serious general reading has more than once led me to a jargon laden collection of unredacted note cards. I utter this warning, because, even in the current impoverished environment, I was recently seduced by a general review into what I can only call an act of bibliophiliac masochism. The book weighs in at just under three pounds, over seven hundred pages of ten point type plus notes, unedited quotations in six point type on almost every page, an adorable postmodern commitment to avoiding imposing a narrative on the reader, and two sentences, back to back, which include the words "heuristic," "abstraction," "self-conscious," "categorial," "revelation," "methodological" and "epistemological." Tilt! I hope that one of the functions of a new review will be to save well-intentioned educated lay readers like me from more doorstops. If we are discussing the lack of a reliable and diverse source of advice about what to read, we should also speak to the lack of elementary standards of responsibility from the publishers. There are always hard cases at the margins, of course, but here are some rules of thumb (Eric, it's irresistible). In an effort to avoid content based censorship, all restrictions are formal. Any book we review must: One, weigh no more than a viable newborn. If all of human DNA can survive in a package around two pounds, so can most timeless analysis. Two, have been read cover to cover by someone whose job title includes the word "editor" and who is holding a writing implement throughout the process. Most magazine writers get more attention from skilled wordsmiths for 700 words than my last author got for 700 pages. Three, contain no more than 20 percent of quotations from other books. If I wanted a copy machine, I'd buy one from Xerox. Four, carry no blurbs from people who will not swear to Patrick Fitzgerald that they actually read every page of the book. Including the quotations. Okay, I understand about the pressures of tenure. As I said, university presses play many roles, including preserving historical material and enabling communication among specialists. But if a piece cannot be expressed in accessible prose, save the rest of us. Just put a sticker on the cover: "Warning, specialized audience only. Do not read if driving or operating heavy machinery."