Book reviews: honesty, objectivity

And what's the point of them anyway?

Image by Martine from Pixabay

What’s the point of book reviews?

I’m taking this question¹ as a starting point because it seems to me that if a reviewer doesn’t actually know why they’re reviewing a book, we might as well all go home and call it a day.

A simple answer would surely be that at least part of the purpose of a review is to tell potential readers whether the book is actually any good or not. Put brutally: is it worth spending valuable time or money on it?

And yet even this simple proposition is by no means accepted by everyone. I read a double-page article about a nonfiction book recently, and it did three things wrong in my humble opinion.

Firstly, it included so much detail about the book that unless you have a really deep interest in the central idea as it relates to a highly niche area of education you probably won't need to buy the book at all.

Secondly, as far as I can tell there was no questioning, no critical comment or insight. It was all very descriptive, or at least too descriptive for my liking. I prefer a more analytical approach. To be frank, it read more like an advertorial than a book review, and I was left wondering how much the newspaper had been paid by the publishers for writing it.

Finally, I don't think the author said whether he actually liked the book or thought it was value for money. You’d have thought that information would be pretty important.

So, all things considered, I don’t think that so-called review was worth the time I spent reading it.

But then I’m judging the quality of that review against a limited set of criteria based on the assumption that the reviewer (a) should have the potential reader of the book in mind and (b) should be acting as an honest broker. By that I mean that we need to be able to assume that the reviewer has no hidden agenda. And this is where we have to expand our horizons a bit and consider the question: what other reasons might there be for reviewing a book? Here are some reasons that come to mind; they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Some reasons for writing book reviews

To earn some money

Nothing wrong with this, of course, but if a reviewer is on an editor’s books there is every likelihood that one day they will be asked to write a review (“by Wednesday this week if possible”) on a subject in which they have neither knowledge nor interest. That has happened to me once or twice, and although I wrote the best review I could, based on reading the book in question very thoroughly indeed, you can’t get away from the fact that I didn’t know enough about the subject matter to ask, “Yes, but what about…?”

I don’t think the importance of that kind of insider knowledge can be overstated. A few years ago I was asked to review a book about teaching in which the author declared that their approach to X was new, exciting, and had never been tried before. Well, I’ve been around the block a few times and I was able to say “Actually, this has been tried before, and what happened as a result was…”. Incidentally, that wasn’t for the sake of self-aggrandisement: if someone is thinking about buying a book because it promises some hitherto unthought of solution, they are entitled to know (a) the possible downsides and (b) that the author has not given the full picture, perhaps because they didn’t know it themselves.

To promote the book for a friend or colleague

This might be a genuine gesture of friendship, with no expectation of a reward of any kind. All very well, except that in this instance it’s the potential buyers and readers the reviewer should be thinking about.

A non-review example of this was an article a few years ago in a national newspaper. The author argued that a very important but much neglected aspect of the history of the UK were the trade wars between Britain and Holland. Right at the end of the article the writer’s byline read: Dr Bunkoff is an expert in mediaeval pottery. His wife has just had published “Britain vs Holland: the importance of the trade wars of the 17th century”.

Now, I don’t know about you, but it strikes me that that article was dishonest. It positioned itself as an objective article but seemed to me to be nothing of the sort.

As above, but as a form of “paying it forward”

You might want to write a favourable review of a friend’s or a colleague’s book in the hope that they will return the favour when your book is published. Again, that doesn’t strike me as particularly honest. Unfortunately, if there’s a proper disclosure of the reviewer’s relationship with the author then it probably makes it harder for people to believe that the review is unbiased.

As a form of revenge

I do wonder sometimes, when I read scathing reviews, what the author might have done to raise the reviewer’s ire.

To demonstrate one’s own expertise

Stephen Potter, in one of his One-upmanship books, declares that the reviewer should take the opportunity to make it clear to the reader that although this book is ok-ish as far as it goes, the publisher really should have asked him, the reviewer, to write it.

Is it possible to be both honest and objective?

It is probably obvious by now that I don’t think it’s possible to be truly objective when writing book reviews. All reviewers come to a book with preconceptions, prejudices, different levels of knowledge.

This is a minefield, of course. In my opinion it’s in everyone’s interest to have the book reviewed by an expert in the field. For instance, there’s not much point in commissioning me to write a review of a book about nuclear fission because what I know about the subject could be written on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for marginal notes. Unless the book was entitled something like: “Nuclear fission for people who know nothing about nuclear fission”. But the narrower the field the fewer experts there are and the greater the likelihood that they all know each other or at least know of each other – in which case one of the more suspect motivations for writing a review is likely to make an appearance.

When I review books I do so in a critical manner — using that word in the intellectual rather than the negative sense. I realise that that may upset some authors, since so many think they ought to be the recipient of the Nobel prize for literature. Well, not to beat about the bush, tough. My duty, as I see it, is to readers and potential readers rather than the author.

I say that, but the truth of the matter is that the author stands to benefit as well, even if or, frankly, especially if, the review is less than effusive about the merits of the book. For example, if I state in a review that the book would have been more effective if section 2 were divided into two subsections, surely that is potentially useful information for if the book goes into a second edition? In effect I, and other reviewers, have given authors free feedback on their “baby”. Indeed, from a feedback point of view, a forensic dissection of the book is likely to be more useful than a review dripping with praise.

For these reasons I don’t think objectivity is desirable even if it were possible.

Concluding remarks

The issue as I see it is that we tend to use some words interchangeably, and those words tend to have certain connotations. Bias is bad, objectivity is good, honesty is good. Therefore the ideal is to have honest, objective and unbiased reviews.

I don’t think that’s possible. I haven’t said anything hitherto about bias, but to make a quick point, bias may be inevitable. For example, if someone who knows nothing about teaching writes a book about how they think teaching should be done, I’m afraid I start from the position of “Given that you have no experience in this area, why would I care what you think?”. More than that, I also have in mind the fact that every time I’ve told people that I’m a teacher I have been subjected to a lecture on what’s wrong with education these days – from people who last went to school fifty years ago. Quite frankly, I’m pretty sick of it. Thus I start from a position of bias, and the best one can do in that situation is to write the review honestly from that perspective.

The best we can hope for, and the gold standard to which all reviewers should aspire to in my opinion, to write reviews as honestly as one can – while of course being sensible enough not to invite a libel action!

Terry Freedman writes Eclectism at:

1. I‘m specifically talking about nonfiction books, although some points may apply to fiction too.