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The extensive space devoted to literature in daily newspapers of every kind, as well as in specialist periodicals, was a leading feature of the period. This chapter addresses the thorny question of the influence wielded by book reviews through a wide survey of contemporary opinion; so too are the merits of anonymous versus signed articles and the opportunities for manipulation in the book trade, as evidenced by favouritism shown to authors who were friendly with particular reviewers or whose publisher ran an expensive advertising campaign. Authors frequently doubled as reviewers. Those whose experiences are featured here include Walter Besant, Robert Browning, Shan Bullock, Samuel Butler, Hall Caine, Joseph Conrad, Marie Corelli, Pearl Craigie (‘John Oliver Hobbes’), Thomas Hardy, Alice Meynell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Thomas, Anthony Trollope, Hugh Walpole, H.G.Wells, and Virginia Woolf. The tastes and philosophies of the leading bookmen — Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, and George Saintsbury — are examined.

This chapter explores Smith's own reading practice to help explain her playful and often hostile relationship with tradition. It focuses on her troubled relationship with her sister, an English literature scholar, and considers its impact on both her attitudes to reading and her literary tastes. It traces this sibling antagonism through to her 1920s reading notebooks and eventually to her own book reviews, which often served as defensive gestures towards her projected reading public. It concludes by noting Smith's deliberate concealment of her own literary influences in essays, interviews, and public appearances.

This chapter shows how critics confront the reality that what they put in their reviews has consequences not only for the book under review but also for the critics themselves. This is in part attributable to the switch-role reward structure, as many reviewers are themselves working writers reviewing other working writer. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates that despite a temptation to write negative reviews of parties they may very well view as competition, critics are hesitant to be overtly negative in their reviews and choose instead to “play nice,” in part driven by a blend of both sympathy for and fear of reprisal from others in the literary field. The key here is that critics imagine various implications for what they write—especially when it comes to negative reviews—and the potential (uncertainty) for retribution or causing pain informs how they behave in the present. The reason they have for imagining the future in the particular ways that they do is anchored in the switch-role reward structure of the reviewing apparatus.

This chapter reveals how critics grapple with the question of the ongoing relevance of book reviewing given perceived tensions between its artistic and journalistic commitments. It also examines how critics respond to challenges about what is distinctly valuable about journalistic reviews against the larger background of who makes up the reviewing field, including the rise of new amateur entrants and the tradition of academic criticism. The chapter shows that, contrary to popular understandings, economic and technological transformations were not the most salient concerns among the critics interviewed when asked about their view of the current state of book reviewing. Distinctions between online and offline, new media and legacy media, or digital and print are not the relevant battle lines when discussing the value and future legitimacy of book reviewing. Critics were more likely to locate the threats to the unique value and mission of journalistic criticism in the practices of other types of reviewers—and not just amateurs.

This chapter provides an alternative way of reading the fiction of this decade. The author begins by restating the special circumstances under which 1930s historiography has been written, and then turn to mainstream critical opinion and its sense of the decade's achievements and challenges, pausing to examine the adjudication of taste that book reviewing played at the time. From that perspective, the chapter then moves to a discussion of the middle-class realism of the era, especially observing several of its principal modes of expression: the woman's novel, the historical novel, the family novel, and the political novel. Along the way, the author also studies some key episodes in literary history and culture by way of indicating how truly normative this fiction was for American readers.

This chapter presents reviews of the following: The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy by Marcia Cavell; Innocence and Experience by Stuart Hampshire; Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson; and Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice by Robert C. Solomon.

This chapter illustrates how the different types of uncertainty structure how fiction reviewers operate. Common to the preceding chapters is the finding that when confronted with different types of uncertainty, reviewers devise “personalized” responses. To be clear, while critics experience the dilemmas of reviewing and their responses to these as individuals problem-solving basis, the chapter argues that this personalized experience is itself a product of the larger social organization of reviewing: specifically, the high levels of epistemological, social, and institutional uncertainty faced by reviewers. In the absence of certainty on how to proceed, critics are left to devise personalized solutions to the challenges that arise throughout the reviewing process. In addition, the chapter considers what lessons book reviewing has for understanding the experience and enactment of power in other evaluative scenarios including other artistic fields, and non-artistic fields as well. Additionally, reflections are offered on what lessons can be taken from the multitude of stories shared by reviewers concerning how we think about the uncertain future of not only reviewing but what it means to be a reader.

This chapter presents a review of the book Knowledge and Politics by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Unger's book provides a schematism of liberal thought and attempts a “total” critique of it. Starting with the psychological assumptions of liberalism, it argues that those assumptions are inextricably interconnected with certain features of liberal political doctrine and that the doctrine as a whole is incoherent and riddled with antinomies. All of the central notions are understood in extremely broad terms—so while Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant are central figures in the “liberal” tradition, Spinoza, Marx, and Weber, despite partial critiques, also share some of its assumptions—and the entire discussion takes place in the context of a broad-based concern with the nature of explanation, the relation of universals and particulars, and immanence and transcendence.

Sheehy’s place in the history of the midlife crisis is central; her book was more than popularized psychology and it garnered millions of readers. Passages was a great success—although Sheehy’s right to intellectual property was contested at first. The idea of midlife crisis filled the void left behind by linear postwar theories of the life course, which were ill equipped to account for the social transformations of the 1970s. Sheehy’s appeal crucially depended on her feminist agenda and social-scientific outlook. Looking at journalistic and professional reviews as well as excerpts, Chapter 4 negotiates the relationship between feminism and the media and examines the impact of “pop science” on academic research. It points to the role of the mass media—especially women’s magazines—as a platform for visions of women’s lives beyond domesticity. In a period of economic crisis and changing social norms, feminism, with its demands for careers for women and new roles for men, turned from an oppositional movement into a cultural tenet. Sheehy’s description of the midlife crisis offered readers of different generations advice for planning or changing their lives, respectively. Passages was also read by social scientists: “pop science” provided a starting point for new research.

This chapter presents the nuts and bolts of how reviewing works. This includes which books gets reviewed and which critic gets selected to write the review. Disabusing the reader of the idea that the “best” books get reviewed, the chapter emphasizes the practical constraints faced by editors when deciding which books deserve to be reviewed. It also addresses epistemic uncertainty surrounding who is qualified to review books in the absence of formal certification. But rather than answering this question philosophically, it is addressed through how reviewers come to be invited to write reviews and are paired with specific books for review.

This introductory chapter presents a study of book reviewing from the perspective of the reviewers. It examines two major dimensions of this research—the study of critics and evaluation as a response to quality uncertainty. The chapter explores the ways in which critics impact book culture as producers of literary value. It then asserts that uncertainty has a central place in the study of evaluation and discusses three different kinds of uncertainty. The first contextual dimension of uncertainty is epistemological. Next, social uncertainty refers to critics' inability to predict how relevant others will respond or react to their evaluations. Institutional uncertainty, another distinct category of uncertainty, concerns the degree of clarity and consensus regarding rules and procedures for behavior and the broader significance or meaning of the work involved in reviewing. To conclude, the chapter provides the sources and methodology of this research, as well as a brief outline of what it entails.

This chapter reviews the book The German Financial System edited by Jan Pieter Krahnen & Reinhard H. Schmidt. The book presents the German banking and securities sectors as they stood in early 2003, halfway through an extensive program of legislative reform. The collapse of the 1990s bull market left the sectors beset by self-doubt, triggering support for the reform movement. The book, focusing on the German banking and securities sectors' role in financing other sectors of the economy, asks whether the German economy really is bank dominated with underdeveloped capital markets. Finding the latter to be the case, the book asks whether it is a good to push toward a more market-oriented system.

This chapter reviews the books, Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States and The Case for Sovereignty: Why the World Should Welcome American Independence, by Jeremy Rabkin. It presents Rabkin's neoconservative defense of United States sovereignty by attempting to soften the impact of the most rhetorically aggressive aspects embedded in his books. Playing along with his rhetorical, strident spiral risks obscuring far more scholarly substantive considerations that frame his work within a specific contemporary doctrinal trend. To categorize Rabkin's as “untouchable” by stressing the aspects of its partisan political posture that would also gratuitously reinforce the accursed fame that neoconservative legal scholars enjoy within their own academy. Moreover, approaching Rabkin's scholarship without animosity offers additional analytic possibilities beyond simply adding another chapter to the inflated rhetoric of “hegemonic international law” that is so in vogue.

This chapter examines Time and Tide’s early music, theatre, film and book reviews – a treasure-trove for exploring trends in interwar literature and the arts as well as debates about the nature and function of criticism itself. Focusing on the contributions of regular columnists including Christopher St John (née Christabel Marshall) and Sylvia Lynd the chapter discusses Time and Tide’s mediation of culture ranging from the modernist and ‘avant-garde’ to the ‘middlebrow’ and popular and posits that its position is identifiably feminist both in terms of its promotion of women in the cultural sphere and in its responses to developments in criticism in the interwar years. Engaging with such topics as the well-known ‘romanticism versus classicism’ debate and modernism’s ‘problem with pleasure’ (Frost 2013), the chapter demonstrates Time and Tide’s commitment both to educating the woman reader in a higher culture and defending traditional reading pleasures.

This chapter discusses the evolution of the Larry Brown(s) that the publisher Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill “built” for promotional campaigns, and which reviewers and the press then “built” for author profiles and book reviews. It suggests that one of the best gauges of Brown’s reputation as a writer is the lack of representation that references his early years, as well as his publicists’ and reviewers’ abilities to bypass “Larry Brown, the fireman writer, if not the Oxford native, the sharecropper’s son, the former marine, or any of his other extraliterary incarnations” to tell their readers about “Larry Brown, writer.” To show how Brown was presented first to reviewers, then to readers, the chapter looks at his works, including Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Big Bad Love, Joe, Father and Son, Fay, and On Fire: A Personal Account of Life and Death and Choices.

This chapter reviews the book Kapitalmarkt und Börsenrecht by Markus Lenenbach. Lenenbach, an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, has undertaken to present capital market law in the form of a practitioner textbook. The book is as a well-written and informative work offering practitioners as well as students a good start on the subject. Lenenbach's work fulfills its ambition to be a practitioner's work-book for commercial law. The fact that any book already is partly outdated on the day of its publication, in light of new legislation, is a problem of the permanent reform of capital market law that confronts any academic in this area of the law.

This chapter reviews the book Welche Verfassung für Europa? (What Constitution for Europe?). The book does not aim to provide a comprehensive examination of the European constitutional debate, nor does it claim to be an introduction to it. Rather, it is simply a collection of short pieces allowing well-known scholars in the field of European studies to make suggestions for the shape of further integration. The review concentrates on the introductory section and the final section, which examine the possible forms and processes of European constitutional creation. The book as a whole is also considered briefly in general terms.

This chapter explores representations of books and readers in a variety of interwar periodicals. As Elizabeth Dickens suggests, in the interwar period, the book trade and the periodical press ‘often worked together, providing content, ideas, and promotion for each other’ (2011: 165). This chapter positions itself, therefore, at the intersection of publishing history and periodical studies. Focusing particularly on regular book review columns and advertisements for books and bookshelves this chapter illuminates the ways in which different kinds of interwar publishers and authors targeted female readerships. Drawing on a variety of kinds of periodicals, from feminist magazines like Time and Tide, to political periodicals like Everywoman, to domestic magazines like Good Housekeeping, the chapter shows the ways in which books were advertised by publishers, recommended by reviewers, and displayed as objects that can both indicate and form taste.