Blogs > Cliopatria > Books, Reviews, and Careers

Jun 3, 2007

Books, Reviews, and Careers


by Cliopatria


A. O. Scott's"The Old Devil," NY Times, 4 June, a review of Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis, is rewarding reading about a major literary life. It's the kind of review that makes you think broadly about books, reviews, and careers.

If you are not a medievalist, you probably missed a review by Reed's William Diebold of a book by Herbert Schutz of Canada's Brock University. It appeared eight months ago in Speculum and is about as painful a review as any you're likely to see this year.

This book has little to recommend it; indeed, it should embarrass both author and publisher. It is hard to know why this has happened: Brill is a serious, professional publishing house and Schutz an experienced writer, author of four other books, including another with Brill and two published by Yale University Press. But neither author nor press can possibly consider this in the ‘finest hour' category, or even an acceptable product. And, at its staggering list price of $226, The Carolingians in Central Europe, Their History, Arts and Architecture is truly a scandal.

The book's faults are so numerous and glaring that it is hard to know where to begin ....

Another Damned Medievalist was looking at Schutz's prior book, The Germanic Realms in Pre-Carolingian Central Europe, 400-750, and found much the same of it. (See also the discussion at her site.) This seems to be a problem of an emeritus professor, with a credible earned doctorate and credible books in 20th century German language and literature. In a long career, without training as an historian, he reached further and further back in time. His later publishers, Brill and Lang, apparently relied on his publication record, without significant peer review of his later manuscripts in medieval history. It's not the way one wants to end a career.


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More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 6/3/2007

In recent years, it's become rare for editors to much in the way of hands-on editing. That's increasingly been left up to peer reviewers and to the author. Some publishing houses largely by-pass peer review, so it's become "Let the author beware." My impression is that journal editors are often still actively editing, but that book editors are largely not.

Nonpartisan - 6/3/2007

Why does it always seem that the publishers who put in the least work on editing and fact-checking their books are the ones who charge the highest list prices? I'm reviewing a book now by a first-time author, a slim 250-page volume not intended as a scholarly text that nevertheless goes for $50. Its text is riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors (which shouldn't detract from the author, who shows much promise). You'd think that, at these prices, the publishers could at least read the thing.