A little help for their friends - demise of the New York Times Book Review

National Review, March 7, 1994 by James Bowman

stances that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There is no

consideration of accidents, coincidences, miscalculations, missed

political signals-only of underlying historical processes in

which the children of light led by the church prevailed over the

children of darkness.

The sarcasm of the last half-sentence, appealing to the Book Review's supersophisticated readers' natural prejudice against religious modes of thinking, is used to reinforce the suggestion in the rest of the passage that Mr. Weigel is too simple-minded to have considered all the other factors that a cleverer person (like Mr. Gati, for instance) would have noticed. But on his own showing such an "impression" could only have been created in someone (like Mr. Gati, for instance) who ignored the author's disclaimers.

Stripped of its rhetorical sneering, all that remains of this passage is Mr. Gati's complaint the Mr. Weigel has not written a book more like his own. This is not criticism, it is publicity. Mr. Gati, a professor of political science at Union College, Schenectady, and author of The Bloc That Failed, never has to mention his own book. It's right there in his thumbnail bio at the bottom of the page.

MR. GATI'S is actually quite a favorable review, but it manifests the paper's general attitude that there is something tainted or suspect about anything emanating from a "right wing" point of view. Again and again, conservative authors who cannot simply be dismissed are condescended to and criticized for things they have not written or things they have which reviewers consider self-evidently untrue. Kenneth Woodward, for example, criticizes Michael Novak's book The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for "theological cheerleading," merely for the suggestion that democratic capitalism is the system of government and social organization most in keeping with the Gospels--as if the book itself were not a compendium of arguments and evidence for that contention, none of which are considered by Mr. Woodward.

Here, to conservatives, is the more familiar face of outcome-based reviewing: if an author comes to a conclusion approved of by the reviewer--that is, a liberal one--he is applauded; if he does not he is condemned. Thus, John Brademas praises Thomas Sowell's Inside American Education for its criticism of schools of education, dumb jocks, and college rankings by journalists, but it is so obvious to him as to be beyond argument that Mr. Sowell is wrong to say that more money does not necessarily mean better education. Usually a reviewer can simply point to a book's "right wing" provenance to discredit it ipso facto. Thus Nina Auerbach agrees with Gerald Graft (in Beyond the Culture Wars) in deploring "the journalists who publicize these attacks [on universities] as disinterested without noting their origins in the political right wing." There is a splendid shamelessness about such obvious partisanship. The authors of the reviews in the NYTBR often feel that they owe the reader not even a pretense of objectivity, impartiality, or judicious weighings up of pros and cons. They and the editors alike assume that the audience is of one mind on all the important issues of the day. So it is that Andrew Delbanco introduces his review of a biography of Abraham Lincoln with this heartwarming story: