- Email: [email protected]
On the Book Review as a Form and a Forum
ASSISTANT EDITOR’S NOTE
On the Book Review as a Form and a Forum Think left and think right And think low and think high Oh, the THINKS you can think up If only you try! —Dr. Seuss/Oh the THINKS You Can Think (Random House, 1975)
Book reviews tend to live near the city lines of academic journals, in neighborhoods south of the “Brief Reports” and north of the “Instructions to Authors.” They tend to be quiet and unassuming neighbors at that, sometimes to a fault, making for too many of even the stronger ones to go by unread. Things need not be so, as evidenced by the prominent place they have achieved and high readerships they consistently reach in a variety of mainstream publications: The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Sunday New York Times Review of Books set a consistently high standard for the medium. Closer to home, the American Psychological Association has recognized the property value at stake, devoting an entire periodical to them: Contemporary Psychology: the APA Review of Books. If for a moment we entertain the notion of the regular article as tree, with each of its methodological and research intricacies the leaves, the concept of the book as forest follows quite naturally. Taking the analogy to its next step, one can think of the book review as a series of related forests, an entire ecosystem of sorts. Whatever the higheraltitude perspectives lack in sharpness of detail and magnification of focus, they can, when successful, more than make up through the panoramic views they allow: through the synthetic embrace that by definition eludes the single tree, no matter how robust. Much as panoramic vistas do, the book review offers the possibility—and the fantasy— of taking it all in, the entire landscape in one fell swoop. Unlike regular articles, book reviews published in academic journals tend to be unstructured and not to follow a stringent format, a characteristic that at once makes them appealing to potential contributors, while uneven in their stylistic quality and overall effectiveness. I will use what may be called Variations on a Book Review Theme so as to elaborate these points, and taking as exemplar that volume dutifully resorted to by child and adolescent psychiatrists in times of need: The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1957). Take, as a starting point for discussion, the review of that book (abbreviated here as CITH) as recently published in the apocryphal Journal of Sleep Induction (JSI): CITH is a book about the adventures of two children paid a visit by an overly friendly cat during a day when their mother has left them alone. The book starts with a rainy and boring day. Chapter 2 (“Bump”) introduces us to the cat, who devises all sorts of silly tricks in chapters 3 to 6. In chapter 7, the cat has fallen on his playful head, leaving the house a big mess and the pet fish perplexed and angry (as well as in a teapot). Chapters 8 and 9 introduce us to the cat’s two helping friends and to his amazing cleaning-up machine. The book concludes with the cat leaving just in the nick of time, as the children’s mother returns home. CITH is a wonderful rhyme book, with a very legible font and many colorful illustrations. Every child should own a copy, and every parent be acquainted with the many good things this book has to offer. I recommend it very enthusiastically.
The review is not entirely without merit; few reviews are. In fact, it epitomizes a key characteristic that reviewers should strive for, but that few (the undersigned included) can consistently achieve, namely that of brevity. Dr. Seuss knew this well, as his poem in praise of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books makes clear: “That’s why my belief is / the briefer the brief is, / the greater the sigh / of the reader’s relief is.” He went a step further, giving us in the process what may be considered the book reviewer’s first rule: “Shorth is better than length.” Alas, other than being pithy, the JSI piece leaves much to be desired as a review. I go on to identify and address three of its leading and paradigmatic deficiencies. The Book Review as Glorified Table of Contents
Specificity is a worthy goal for any type of writing, but the regurgitation of book section and chapter constituents is not the way of reaching that aim. As exemplified above, we may all resort to a book’s “vital statistics” in an effort to overcome vague, fuzzy, or impoverished aspects of our own writing. In his 1958 sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes 110
J. AM. ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 43:1, JANUARY 2004
ASSISTANT EDITOR’S NOTE
Back, Dr. Seuss had sage advice on how best to deal with this very natural writing temptation: “Take your Little Cats G, / F, E, D, C, B, A. / Put them back in your hat / and you take them away!” (p. 47). The Book Review Section as Sales Catalog
A survey of book reviews appearing in recent medical journals would suggest that it has become fashionable, if not a stylistic requirement, to invoke a statement to the effect that the book in case belongs in the shelf of the targeted practitioner (“a must!”). Not only does this approach provide a tired refrain from review to self-same review, but it is one that gets things backwards as well, for it is not through our telling readers to buy the book that they will enjoy it, but the other way around. But if salesmanship is what one is after (not in the form of encouraging a book purchase so much as inviting true engagement with its content), then it is through ideas and lively writing that we can maximize the chances of our pitch. Reviewers are well advised to set stodgy, grave, and morose writing styles aside, allowing instead the book review to serve as habitat for whatever creativity and sparkle may hibernate in their prose. If not me, believe then the good Doctor: “Look at me! / Look at me now! / It is fun to have fun / But you have to know how” (CITH, p. 18). The Book Reviewed, at Face Value and in a Vacuum
The power of the book review lies in its ability to read into (or out of ) the text, and to contextualize this particular book within a larger framework or world view. The fatal flaw of JSI’s insipid piece lay in its monotonic and literal approach, in seeing the book review as a format at best, a mere formality at worst, rather than a quintessential forum for thought exchange. JSI missed the fact that CITH is the u¨ber-classic that it is precisely because it works at more than a single level: the book is about more than silly feline antics. One might begin its deconstruction on a Freudian note, saying that the book accurately maps the structures of the unconscious, what with ego (Sally and I), superego (that holier-than-thou fish), and id in the stellar (and namesake) role. Younger practitioners might gravitate to the categorical diagnostics included instead (take, for example, the poster boy [or cat, for that matter] of mania coming down from a high: “Then he shut up the Things / In the box with the hook. / And the cat went away / With a sad kind of look” (p. 54). From a systems perspective we may wonder about the breakdowns that occur in the context of a void authority structure: the Cat as libertine excess personified, or Thing One and Thing Two as furtive and forbidden, sexually tinged secrets. Taking a social and political viewpoint one might go even further than that, as Louis Menand so effectively did in his 2002 New Yorker review (Cat People, Dec. 23 & 30), in which he saw in the CITH “a Cold War invention” (p. 148) to confront “the accepted diagnosis that the United States was being beaten in the arms race by a nation with a superior educational system” (p. 151). As a metaphor, the Voom! that so efficiently cleanses the pink mess left behind by the cat’s Return (p. 59) has atomic overtones that are hard to ignore. From an educational perspective, Menand contends that with its approach to reading through phonics and illustrations, as opposed to the established mnemonics, CITH transformed primary education, at a time when “children’s lit was a Cold War growth industry, right alongside Boeing, Northrop, and Dow Chemical” (p. 152). Moreover, it led publishing houses to realize the potential that lay waiting in a large “unexploited class of consumers” (p. 151). Harry Potter, take note. With this issue of the Journal, a new assistant editor for book reviews takes over the position that Christopher Thomas held for the past 3 years. In addition to contributing to the liveliness of the neighborhood, Chris did much for our trainees by bringing new talent on board: reviews by residents have gone from dodo-like rarities to a staple feature of the Book Reviews diet. That trend will continue and hopefully progress, as we encourage you, our reader, to consider reviewing books through mentored partnerships with trainees, that next generation of child and adolescent psychiatrists. As experts in development we should champion the process at each turn we can: when it comes to our book reviews, our Journal, or our field more generally, we should ponder, with equal parts of awe and anticipation, and following the script that who but the good Doctor would have given us in 1990: “Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! / There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. / Oh The Places You’ll Go!” (p. 32). Andre´s Martin, M.D., M.P.H. Yale Child Study Center New Haven, CT DOI: 10.1097/01.chi.0000106409.84858.fc
J. AM. ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 43:1, JANUARY 2004
111
On the Book Review as a Form and a Forum Think left and think right And think low and think high Oh, the THINKS you can think up If only you try! —Dr. Seuss/Oh the THINKS You Can Think (Random House, 1975)
Book reviews tend to live near the city lines of academic journals, in neighborhoods south of the “Brief Reports” and north of the “Instructions to Authors.” They tend to be quiet and unassuming neighbors at that, sometimes to a fault, making for too many of even the stronger ones to go by unread. Things need not be so, as evidenced by the prominent place they have achieved and high readerships they consistently reach in a variety of mainstream publications: The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Sunday New York Times Review of Books set a consistently high standard for the medium. Closer to home, the American Psychological Association has recognized the property value at stake, devoting an entire periodical to them: Contemporary Psychology: the APA Review of Books. If for a moment we entertain the notion of the regular article as tree, with each of its methodological and research intricacies the leaves, the concept of the book as forest follows quite naturally. Taking the analogy to its next step, one can think of the book review as a series of related forests, an entire ecosystem of sorts. Whatever the higheraltitude perspectives lack in sharpness of detail and magnification of focus, they can, when successful, more than make up through the panoramic views they allow: through the synthetic embrace that by definition eludes the single tree, no matter how robust. Much as panoramic vistas do, the book review offers the possibility—and the fantasy— of taking it all in, the entire landscape in one fell swoop. Unlike regular articles, book reviews published in academic journals tend to be unstructured and not to follow a stringent format, a characteristic that at once makes them appealing to potential contributors, while uneven in their stylistic quality and overall effectiveness. I will use what may be called Variations on a Book Review Theme so as to elaborate these points, and taking as exemplar that volume dutifully resorted to by child and adolescent psychiatrists in times of need: The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1957). Take, as a starting point for discussion, the review of that book (abbreviated here as CITH) as recently published in the apocryphal Journal of Sleep Induction (JSI): CITH is a book about the adventures of two children paid a visit by an overly friendly cat during a day when their mother has left them alone. The book starts with a rainy and boring day. Chapter 2 (“Bump”) introduces us to the cat, who devises all sorts of silly tricks in chapters 3 to 6. In chapter 7, the cat has fallen on his playful head, leaving the house a big mess and the pet fish perplexed and angry (as well as in a teapot). Chapters 8 and 9 introduce us to the cat’s two helping friends and to his amazing cleaning-up machine. The book concludes with the cat leaving just in the nick of time, as the children’s mother returns home. CITH is a wonderful rhyme book, with a very legible font and many colorful illustrations. Every child should own a copy, and every parent be acquainted with the many good things this book has to offer. I recommend it very enthusiastically.
The review is not entirely without merit; few reviews are. In fact, it epitomizes a key characteristic that reviewers should strive for, but that few (the undersigned included) can consistently achieve, namely that of brevity. Dr. Seuss knew this well, as his poem in praise of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books makes clear: “That’s why my belief is / the briefer the brief is, / the greater the sigh / of the reader’s relief is.” He went a step further, giving us in the process what may be considered the book reviewer’s first rule: “Shorth is better than length.” Alas, other than being pithy, the JSI piece leaves much to be desired as a review. I go on to identify and address three of its leading and paradigmatic deficiencies. The Book Review as Glorified Table of Contents
Specificity is a worthy goal for any type of writing, but the regurgitation of book section and chapter constituents is not the way of reaching that aim. As exemplified above, we may all resort to a book’s “vital statistics” in an effort to overcome vague, fuzzy, or impoverished aspects of our own writing. In his 1958 sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes 110
J. AM. ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 43:1, JANUARY 2004
ASSISTANT EDITOR’S NOTE
Back, Dr. Seuss had sage advice on how best to deal with this very natural writing temptation: “Take your Little Cats G, / F, E, D, C, B, A. / Put them back in your hat / and you take them away!” (p. 47). The Book Review Section as Sales Catalog
A survey of book reviews appearing in recent medical journals would suggest that it has become fashionable, if not a stylistic requirement, to invoke a statement to the effect that the book in case belongs in the shelf of the targeted practitioner (“a must!”). Not only does this approach provide a tired refrain from review to self-same review, but it is one that gets things backwards as well, for it is not through our telling readers to buy the book that they will enjoy it, but the other way around. But if salesmanship is what one is after (not in the form of encouraging a book purchase so much as inviting true engagement with its content), then it is through ideas and lively writing that we can maximize the chances of our pitch. Reviewers are well advised to set stodgy, grave, and morose writing styles aside, allowing instead the book review to serve as habitat for whatever creativity and sparkle may hibernate in their prose. If not me, believe then the good Doctor: “Look at me! / Look at me now! / It is fun to have fun / But you have to know how” (CITH, p. 18). The Book Reviewed, at Face Value and in a Vacuum
The power of the book review lies in its ability to read into (or out of ) the text, and to contextualize this particular book within a larger framework or world view. The fatal flaw of JSI’s insipid piece lay in its monotonic and literal approach, in seeing the book review as a format at best, a mere formality at worst, rather than a quintessential forum for thought exchange. JSI missed the fact that CITH is the u¨ber-classic that it is precisely because it works at more than a single level: the book is about more than silly feline antics. One might begin its deconstruction on a Freudian note, saying that the book accurately maps the structures of the unconscious, what with ego (Sally and I), superego (that holier-than-thou fish), and id in the stellar (and namesake) role. Younger practitioners might gravitate to the categorical diagnostics included instead (take, for example, the poster boy [or cat, for that matter] of mania coming down from a high: “Then he shut up the Things / In the box with the hook. / And the cat went away / With a sad kind of look” (p. 54). From a systems perspective we may wonder about the breakdowns that occur in the context of a void authority structure: the Cat as libertine excess personified, or Thing One and Thing Two as furtive and forbidden, sexually tinged secrets. Taking a social and political viewpoint one might go even further than that, as Louis Menand so effectively did in his 2002 New Yorker review (Cat People, Dec. 23 & 30), in which he saw in the CITH “a Cold War invention” (p. 148) to confront “the accepted diagnosis that the United States was being beaten in the arms race by a nation with a superior educational system” (p. 151). As a metaphor, the Voom! that so efficiently cleanses the pink mess left behind by the cat’s Return (p. 59) has atomic overtones that are hard to ignore. From an educational perspective, Menand contends that with its approach to reading through phonics and illustrations, as opposed to the established mnemonics, CITH transformed primary education, at a time when “children’s lit was a Cold War growth industry, right alongside Boeing, Northrop, and Dow Chemical” (p. 152). Moreover, it led publishing houses to realize the potential that lay waiting in a large “unexploited class of consumers” (p. 151). Harry Potter, take note. With this issue of the Journal, a new assistant editor for book reviews takes over the position that Christopher Thomas held for the past 3 years. In addition to contributing to the liveliness of the neighborhood, Chris did much for our trainees by bringing new talent on board: reviews by residents have gone from dodo-like rarities to a staple feature of the Book Reviews diet. That trend will continue and hopefully progress, as we encourage you, our reader, to consider reviewing books through mentored partnerships with trainees, that next generation of child and adolescent psychiatrists. As experts in development we should champion the process at each turn we can: when it comes to our book reviews, our Journal, or our field more generally, we should ponder, with equal parts of awe and anticipation, and following the script that who but the good Doctor would have given us in 1990: “Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! / There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. / Oh The Places You’ll Go!” (p. 32). Andre´s Martin, M.D., M.P.H. Yale Child Study Center New Haven, CT DOI: 10.1097/01.chi.0000106409.84858.fc
J. AM. ACAD. CHILD ADOLESC. PSYCHIATRY, 43:1, JANUARY 2004
111