If a normal person is asked whether he or she has read a certain book, the response can be a simple “yes” or “no.” For a journalist (i.e., not a normal person), there’s a wonderfully cynical rejoinder: “Read it? I haven’t even reviewed it!” Also: “Well, I’ve read in it.” I was reminded of this upon learning the writer Florence King had died last week. In a National Review column from 1999 (“The Misanthrope’s Column,” which she shared with my colleague Andrew Ferguson), King dispenses invaluable advice on how best to review a book.
Actually, King first explains how she turned down an academic institution’s invitation for her to teach a class on how to go about this. Naturally, she never studied how to review a book—she just reviewed. And reviewed and reviewed. Her fear is that the “Educationists,” if they had their druthers, would love to have “licensed graduates of Advanced Book Reviewing, Book Reviewing Dynamics, Book Reviewing Resources, Book Reviewing: An Overview, and no book reviewers.”
And still, she offers nine tips, which journalism majors should take to heart (it would have been a great class!). I haven’t found the original article, dated February 8, 1999, anywhere online, and I can’t reprint the entire column here. But I hope perhaps someone at NR will eventually retrieve it from the archives and post it as a public service. The world would be a better place.
Okay, fine, I’ll mention just a couple:
She may be wrong about that last bit.
King urges aspiring reviewers to avoid using the words “compelling” and “quite simply.” She also advises against reviewing books by Ayn Rand. “Even if you rave it, her gremlins will find something to go bananas about and write you a letter: ‘Dear Social Metaphysician! Examine your anti-Objectivist premises and you will see that your epistemology stinks!!!'”
Needless to say, she will be missed.
