My review essay on The Bridge, David Remnick’s book on President Obama, is now up on the Foreign Affairs website.  I liked the book and learned from it: recommended reading.

I grew up wanting to be a writer, and have been trying my hands at different writing forms since I was a kid.  At the tender age of ten I made my debut as a public intellectual and journalist; with my brothers, my sister and the kids in our neighborhood (and a lot of support from my parents) I launched my first journalistic venture: The Neighborhood Gazette.  This was a more or less biweekly newspaper that came out during the school year; we produced it on the mimeograph machine at the Episcopal church where my father served as rector and we sold it door to door through the neighborhood at a nickel a copy.  After a couple of years I turned it over to my brother Chris, and he left it in such a flourishing state that both of my other siblings were able to have a year or two at the helm.  (Apparently, the Gazette is available through a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Those folks are pretty thorough, is all I can say.)

Journalism was a lot of fun then.  First, we made money.  As the revenue rolled in from our sales force, we spread the take (almost all change) across the living room floor and sorted and wrapped the coins.  We set aside money for mimeograph stencils (sold by the ‘quire’ of 24), paper (sold then as now by the ‘ream’ of 500 sheets) and ink.  We took the rest to the bank and when enough had accumulated — usually between fifty and a couple of hundred dollars — we turned it over to the local public library to buy books for children.

Second, we got a lot of attention.  People in the neighborhood loved the paper.  Our features like “Baby of the Week” and “Pet of the Week” were huge hits.  One week we had a mistake in the “Recipe of the Week” — and my family’s phone number was inundated with calls from neighbors to complain.  As the paper got older and more successful (our circulation eventually hit 600 copies an issue), the local ‘grown-up’ newspaper started quoting our editorials.  Feature writers in North Carolina and surrounding states figured out that a kids’ newspaper was a perfect Sunday supplement story; articles about our paper were soon popping up all over.

We also got access.  Celebrities like Bob Hope and Richard Chamberlain (then at the peak of his fame as TV’s Dr. Kildare) came to town; the Neighborhood Gazette got face time.  I published an editorial calling on the state to raise money for education by taxing bubble gum; the governor wrote a letter in response.  (This brilliant policy idea, like so many of my innovative suggestions over the years, has still not been made law.)

Third, we built a team.  A substantial fraction of the kids in our part of town ended up on the staff.  The main requirement to be on staff was that you had to contribute three short news items each issue for our ever-popular “Neighbors in the News” feature: whose grandparents were coming to visit, whose dog went to the vet, and so forth.  (The best item that ever ran in this column was from one of our crack Glen Lennox reporters.  As best I remember, it said simply that “Two birds built their nest in Peachy Wickers’ bra.”  Peachy, apparently, had left her bra on the clothesline a little too long.)  The weekend of publication we’d meet for Kool-Aid and cookies (thanks, Mom!) and set forth in groups of two to sell the paper door to door.

Fun, fame, fortune and friends: what’s not to like?  I went on to start what still, after forty years, is the newspaper of record at my old high school — and here I am, blogging and writing articles and books almost half a century since The Neighborhood Gazette first saw the light of day.

At no stage along the way, however, did I ever realize just how much of my writing life would be wrapped up in book reviews.  Even back in the Gazette days I was writing plenty of book reports — Mrs. Blaine, the matriarchal ruler of the fifth grade at Glenwood Elementary was a particular fan of this genre — and as an English major I would go on to write many term papers that were, essentially, review essays; it never occurred to me to think of this work as writing.  Writing was novels, poetry, articles.  Book reports were homework.

Ever since I started writing for money (and as Samuel Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything else”) book reviews have played a much larger role in my career than I ever imagined.  Other peoples’ reviews of my books helped make me visible as a writer; my reviews of books by other people take up huge amounts of time.  For several years now I have contributed “capsule reviews” on books on the United States to Foreign Affairs.  That means that five times a year I write five mini-reviews of roughly 200 words each.  Additionally, I usually write a “review essay” — like the one on the Remnick book — once or twice a year for Foreign Affairs and from time to time I contribute book reviews to other journals and newspapers.

This turns out to be hard work.  The sheer amount of reading involved is daunting, to say the least.  Fortunately ‘books on the United States’ is a broad category; anything from Revolutionary and colonial history to the Obama administration’s national security strategy is fair game.  Over the years I’ve thrown in a novel or two as well as literary biographies that I feel cast light on issues of interest to Foreign Affairs readers.  One is always aware, too, that Foreign Affairs reaches a large international audience and so one looks for books that would help foreigners understand us better.  There is never a time when I don’t have some Foreign Affairs books in my ‘to read’ pile, and both my office and my home reading tables are always covered by the masses of books that come in to be considered for each issue.

Reviewing books on this scale is morally more complicated than I expected.  Does the eminent person who has written a forgettable book get the slot, or does it go to the promising unknown?  If someone has written a truly bad book, is it better to pass over it in silence or to tan its sorry hide pour encourager les autres?  Do you choose a mediocre book on a vital subject over a fresh and original book on a less important topic?  Capsule reviews are difficult to write at all, and even more difficult to write fairly.  200 words is not a lot of room to tell readers roughly what to expect in the book while also rendering judgment.

Review essays present another set of difficulties.  In my review of The Bridge, for example, I was confronted with alternatives that are familiar to many reviewers.  Did it make more sense to write an essay that was entirely centered on explicating and sometimes criticizing Remnick’s take on Obama, or should I use The Bridge as a springboard for offering the Mead take on Obama?  This was easier to resolve than it sometimes is; one of the chief merits of Remnick’s book is the way it stimulates readers to rethink their views of the president.

But the real difficulty that besets me every time I review a book is that as an author myself I know just how much blood and toil goes into every book.  I do my level best to read all these books with the appropriate attention and care, but it is incredibly difficult for a critic to do full justice to an author.  I’d rather give a bad grade to a student than write an unfavorable review of a book any day; even bad authors have put much more work into a book that the best of students pours into a course.  Also, as an author, I know just how annoying many of the standard book review tropes can be.  Most reviews are written by people much less knowledgeable than the author on the subject at hand; I for example do not know nearly as much about James Knox Polk as Robert Merry, author of the recent (and excellent) Polk biography titled A Country of Vast Designs.  Yet the tendency for the reviewer to chide an author for failing to attend sufficiently to this or that small point, or in some other way to suggest that the author has somehow failed to match the omniscient reviewer’s knowledge and perspective is almost irresistible.  I do my best to resist it, but I am sure that there are many authors who can show you exactly how I’ve failed.

We didn’t have a book review section in The Neighborhood Gazette.  We ran fiction; one of the paper’s main features were the back page serializations of my brother Chris’ adventure epics (“Eeney Meany and the Yo-ho-hos” as Chuckleena fought the forces of evil in, I think, Alaska, or the jungle thriller “Kimbu and Tonga”).  I suppose we might have run book reviews if more of our neighbors had been writing books, but even then book reports seemed more like homework and less like fun than the other things that went into journalism.  Writing about the annual kite flying contest (supported by one of our major advertisers, the Glen Lennox Pharmacy) was fun; writing a book report was work.

There are times when I still feel that way, but increasingly I’ve accepted my fate as a serial book review author.  You get a lot of free books this way and, when you find something that is really first rate, it can be very rewarding to share that discovery with the world.  Once or twice I’ve read something while preparing my capsules at Foreign Affairs that was so outstanding that I was able to persuade the editors to let me praise it at greater length in a review essay.  And sometimes you are able to give an interesting and talented young writer a boost.  Ron Steele’s review of my first book in The New Republic almost 25 years ago did that for me, and I’m always glad to have the chance to send that kind of good energy down the line.

But the best thing about being a serial reviewer turns out to be something unexpected but wonderful: you have two first class excuses for turning people down who ask you to blurb their new book.  First, you can legitimately plead that you are too busy — there is never a time when I’m not inundated with books or pressed by a review deadline.  And second, you can point out that if you blurb a book, you won’t be able to review it later, observing that the review will probably do the book more good.

One of the problems connected with the decline of newspapers today is the gradual disappearance of the space for book reviews.  Free standing book review sections used to be common; now they are rare.  As independent bookstores gradually fade away (Washington’s Politics and Prose is on the auction block), and as even the chain megastores face the onslaught of electronic book publishing, it’s getting harder and harder for readers to have chance encounters with books they have never heard of but might like to read.  At The American Interest Online we’ll be thinking about what we can do to bring good books to readers’ attention.  Your suggestions are welcome.