By Ezra
The New York Times' review of Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal really is weirdly bad. It's not that I can't imagine disagreeing with the book's theses, but that the review really doesn't do any of that. Instead, it isolates certain lines or argumentative threads and basically gestures in their direction -- "Oh, doesn't that sound weird?" "It's like Michael Moore is here in the room with me!" "This date was off by a whole year!" It's argument through eyebrow raising. (It's also, at key points, wrong.)
Now, I like me a good bad book review. I've even written a couple. But book reviews are dangerous things. It's simple never the case that the editor of a book review section is charged with reading all the books commissioned for review and then checking each critic's claims for accuracy. So all power accrues to the reviewer, and the reviewer's incentive is often to write something interesting, or that accords with the editor's biases, or that advances the publication's ideological agenda. Unless you're working for Booklist, you're unlikely to be judged on how accurately your review summarizes the key points of the book in question.
