On Reviewing
Philosophy and Practice of Attentive Reading
I want to talk for a bit about book reviews, which tend to be one of my main outlets for published work these days.
Mostly, I’d like to share my review of Dr. Malcolm Foley’s stunning new book The Anti-Greed Gospel over at Englewood Review of Books:
Throwing off every constraint to the pursuit of wealth may just be our national religion, and the American church has too consistently tried to mesh this creed with the gospel of a Lord who declares that the kingdom of God belongs to the poor (Luke 4, 6, and elsewhere).
Pastor and historian Malcolm Foley reminds us just how much the mainstream American outlook on life stands not just on a desire for a flourishing life, but on greed—“when desire outstrips need” (17). This is in sharp contrast to the teachings of Jesus. In The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why the Love of Money Is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create a New Way Forward, Foley says that “the body of Christ is called to exemplify a different way of thinking and living” (163). Greed doesn’t go quietly, though. Perhaps more so than other sins, greed cuts to the heart as an attitude that flows from disordered worship. It is an idolatrous relationship with what Scripture calls “Mammon”—a rival god; a false second master that Jesus tells us we cannot serve if we are to follow Him; a voracious idol demanding sacrifice (2).
Rather than simply stating the theological facts of the matter, Foley locates his analysis of the ways Mammon infects our hearts and demands unholy sacrifices in the particularly American history of racialized capitalism—“an economy whose bottom gear is torture,” as historian Edward Baptist put it. He pulls no punches in demonstrating that the horrors of chattel enslavement and Jim Crow and lynching stem not merely from hatred, but from greed. He roots racism in how the desire to accumulate wealth facilitated creation of an exploitable class of people whose rights and ownership of their own labor have been stripped from them. He traces these threads through to the present day, showing how the logic of exploitation still animates much of American economic life.
…
[Foley] connects the logic of lynching to the more subtle violence inherent in not caring for those in poverty and in pursuing our own personal prosperity without considering its effects on others. He asks us to reconsider whether generosity—giving of resources accumulated through our participation in a flawed economic system to meet the material needs of others—is sufficient. He calls Christians to the deeper, incarnational generosity of solidarity with those suffering in poverty and injustice rather than throwing our lot in with those at the top of the economic heap. He asks us to follow Christ’s example of sacrificial service that resists exploitation through creating a mutually supportive community.
I’ll take this occasion, also, to share a bit more about how I got into the review game, and how I go about reviewing books.
Over the last several years, I’ve published reviews of new book releases at Englewood, Fathom, Mere Orthodoxy, and even The Gospel Coalition. I’ve done other engagement with older and newer books and movies periodically on my old blog (including an annual booklist of some of my favorite reads).
I blame one of my history professors in college for this habit (I minored in history, so had plenty of experience with his style). Something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the semester grade in his courses was based on book reviews rather than tests or papers. He’d give out a list of hundreds of books on the subject at hand, and you’d sign up for the 4 you’d read through the semester. Each review had to be thorough and crisp (only 4-5 double-spaced pages as I recall), and then presented to the class. The professor and our fellow students would ask questions for 15-20 minutes, and we had to know the work well to answer these (a practice primarily for the benefit of majors who were prepping for oral exams to graduate). He’d gently remind us that he had read them all, and so would know if we were skimming or omitting sections.
Since then, I’ve never really stopped reading deeply and then taking time to jot down some thoughts on what I’d read or at least seeking out others to talk about it. I’m still never quite sure if I’ve read something if I haven’t processed it verbally in some way. This is the nature of culture-making, I suppose—a call-and-response dance of creator and receiver that completes the chord a work is trying to strike.
I’ve also learned to love reading reviews, and watching someone who really pays attention to details explore a cultural artifact for the benefit of the rest of us. Sometimes you find a great review because you’re already interested in the book/movie in question. Sometimes, you learn to follow a particular reviewer because you’ve read enough of their work to trust their instincts (Alissa Wilkinson, a New York Times film critic, is one of my favorites). In both cases, you get better at your craft by absorbing the good work of others.
Writing Reviews
Most of the reviews I write on my blog flow from the joy of having read (or watched) something worth sharing and a desire to reflect on it for the benefit of others.
Most of the reviews I publish formally are requested by a magazine or website. I’m seldom paid for that work (beyond one free book), and publications are always looking for good reviewers. It’s not too hard to break into the review publishing world—find a place publishing reviews that you appreciate, and ask if they’d be willing to have you take a shot at one for an upcoming title.
While I’ll read and enjoy books from all over the spectrum of intellectual and cultural life, my published reviews mostly have a few clear “lanes” based on my education and experience. For me those are theological issues, church life, and (especially) issues of mercy and justice with an eye toward community development that addresses root causes of poverty. There are plenty of great books out there that I’d love to review, but those authors deserve to be covered by people in their own fields of expertise to bring the best nuance to the review and introduce the book accurately to readers.
Whatever I’m reviewing, though, I’ve got a few clear goals.
Try to give the sense of what it feels like to read the book, not to give a summary of the content. Readers can easily find out what a book is “about” by looking at the marketing page on a publisher’s website or the table of contents on a preview page before purchasing. I want to help readers see why they should read it—what it is about this particular book and author that makes sense and how it will benefit the reader.
I focus on making sure I really get what the author is trying to do with the book before I process any of my own feedback. I always imagine authors as my primary audience for reviews, and want to make sure they would recognize the contours of their thought and their work in what I say about it. It’s not just hypothetical, either—the author of a book is the one person I know will read my review. I want to be in conversation with him or her, even if we never meet. (Though I’ve certainly reviewed at least a few books for real-life friends). When authors tell me I’ve understood their project or read them well, I’m sure other readers of the review will connect the dots as well and buy books worth buying.
No book exists in a vacuum, and even the freshest ideas have been kicked around before somewhere by someone. The best works are a delightful, “yes, and,” to larger cultural or academic conversations. Authors know this and publishers know this—that’s why every book proposal has a “comparative titles” section where prospective authors interact with how their book will be similar to and different from other recent books or classic works. Many readers may not, however, be thinking on that wavelength. I try to locate a book in these broader streams and fit it into the big picture—both the particular topical conversation the author intends to enter and other parallel conversations in different fields they may be alluding to or even unaware of. If I do this work well, not only do I help give a book more points of contact with potential readers or other authors, but I might just introduce readers of the review to other works they will benefit from. To do this requires reading A LOT of books and stretching your pattern-recognition muscles.
Lastly, a note on style. Every reviewer is probably going to do this differently, so take this with a grain of salt. I don’t make notes along the way, or even begin to think about the review until I’ve finished the whole book. I do still annotate the book as I read (underlining particularly good passages or asking questions in the margins), but I prefer to keep my thoughts about the book at bay until I see the full sweep of the authors’s work.
After finishing the book, I let it “simmer” for a few days before writing—waiting for thoughts to coalesce and connect with other things I’ve read. Then I sit down to do the review, usually fairly quickly as a “swift, clear gesture” (a phrase I’ve heard to describe Van Gogh’s painting style). I’ll clean it up a bit on read-through, and maybe add in a few quotes from the book or cite page numbers, but it’s not really an iterative process for me.
For now, that’s my story. I’ll keep at it as long as people keep writing and reading good books. I hope that when I can finally get a book or two together that someone out there will take the same time and care to review my work, and keep the gift of attention and understanding going.