by Jeffrey Herf

Our country and our culture badly need a new weekly review of books. Currently, most of our major book reviews are failing to inform a non-specialist but sophisticated audience about American scholarship. The American Association of University Presses estimates that the 95 university presses in this country publish about 10,000 books a year. The New York Times Book Review, not to mention the book reviews at The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal devote a tiny fraction of their reviews to these works of scholarship. The Times reviews ten or less non-fiction books a week and those are overwhelmingly published by the New York trade publishers who advertise in the book review and who publish books aimed at a mass public. The New York Review of Books is published 20 times a year. At a rate of about 25 reviews in each issue, it offers about 500 reviews annually. They are a mix of works from the major trade presses and scholarly presses. The New York Review for many years has been known for its leftish and left-liberal politics as much as for its serious book reviewing. Hence it encourages its featured writers to write essays that are often longer on political opinion than on elaboration of books under review. While some of the book reviewing in the The New York Review is excellent, it does not see its primary mission as that of informing a non-specialist audience about developments in the world of scholarship. The book review section of The New Republic, to which many of us have contributed and admire greatly, is in my perhaps biased opinion, the best in American letters. But space allows our finest editor, Leon Wieseltier to commission only two or three books for review each issue or about 150 to 170 a year. This leaves about 9,300 scholarly books every year that no one outside the scholarly disciplines hears about. A good many of these works are not intended for a non- specialist audience. Indeed, some would be incomprehensible to anyone outside the respective academic discipline. Others, while comprehensible may be about narrow topics that are crucial for the advance of knowledge but are not of interest to anyone outside a relatively small circle of experts. Still others are poorly written or penned in impenetrable prose that may be a parody of critics view of political correctness. Some, we can acknowledge, are poorly or inadequately edited as well. England's Times Literary Supplement reviews between 1,000 and 1,500 books a year. If you consider that this figure includes books published in England as well as the United States, this is also a very small fraction of works published in a year. But the TLS does regularly select what its editors regard as important works in the various academic disciplines. A reader of the TLS will have some idea of what some of the important works of philosophy, history, political and social theory, literary criticism and economics have been in a given year. Non-specialist readers in the United States do not have a publication which offers them comparable depth and breadth of coverage. We scholars know that there are fine universities located all over the United States. We know that talent is dispersed around the country as never before. It extends well beyond the most traditionally famous universities and extends far beyond Manhattan which, partly due to its high cost of living, is far less the scholarly and intellectual mecca it once was. We know that a large number of very fine, well written, deeply researched and important works are being published in this country to the sound of deafening silence. We know that most of the vast non-specialist audience of university graduates in the United States hasn't a clue about what is going on in history, political science, sociology, economics, philosophy, literary criticism, art history, the natural sciences, and a host of other smaller academic disciplines. Indeed, despite much talk about interdisciplinary work, we know that within the academy, most scholars have only the foggiest notion of what is going on in other disciplines. We know that for the overwhelming number of college graduates in the United States, the last serious work of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that many of them will ever read, will probably be the last required text in the last semester of their senior year in college. Many of our students tell us how much they enjoyed reading various works we assign in our classes. How are they expected to continue to read such works if none are brought to their attention? As a result our culture has become much less than the sum of its parts. The loudest and most strident voices, but not the best and most creative, affect public perception of what is happening in the academy. There is no point in romanticizing the universities or denying that some criticisms of political correctness and impenetrable prose are on the mark. Indeed, denying all this only fosters cynicism and disbelief in the general public. Yet we also know that such criticisms do not capture all of the story. The American university is also filled with very fine scholars in a variety of disciplines. The fact that their work rarely comes to the attention of a non-specialist audience is often due more to the absence of a transmission belt than of its intrinsic lack of quality. The resulting gap contributes to the debasement of our public life and the triumph of trash over serious reflection. Do the alumni who contribute billions of dollars to their alma mater really have no interest in keeping up with what the professors teaching their children are actually doing or is the disinterest a product of lack of knowledge? At the moment there is a hole in our cultural life where a bridge needs to be built. The time has come for an entrepreneur or entrepreneurs to get together with fair and distinguished editors to create a new weekly book review, one that will do justice to excellent American scholarship that remains a well kept secret to the vast number of potential readers in this country and around the world. The time for a new American review of books is long overdue.