Blogging Book Reviews

So I wrote a review of this book on “Pagan ethics” that was supposed to be published this past December, but the journal is undergoing a period of transition, or something, so it hasn’t gotten the issue out yet. Meanwhile, a blogger recently reviewed the same book, with a great deal of criticism and fault-finding, though I found it to be quite a good book that accomplished exactly what it aimed to accomplish (even if this blogger, a whole-hearted academic, found those aims “underwhelming” and maybe a bit too plebeian for his taste—I don’t see why he’s surprised, as the author is not and never has been an academic).

So I left a rather long comment to his post, objecting to some of his criticisms as inaccurate. He accused the author, for instance, of ignoring politics, which seemed to me just a dumb thing to say considering she spent pages and pages on both “traditional” political issues like abortion, war, environmentalism, etc. as well as more subtle subjects dealing with “living in community” (the broadest definition of politics), such as romantic and familial relationships, animal rights, etc. He also railed against the absence of “ancient Pagan philosophies of ethics”—my response to which was, yes, well, she explicitly states that she is not taking an academic/scholarly approach to the question and much of her text is based on group conversations she’s had with real-life modern Pagans dealing with real-life modern problems. Not to say that ancient philosophies don’t have anything to say about such problems or that we shouldn’t study them and even revive them… but that wasn’t the aim of the book. If you want a book like that, then go write one. Nobody’s stopping you.

Of course, for all my careful thought, the blogger responded with one rather dismissive sentence in reply, addressing the readability and practicality of ancient philosophy, which was beside the point I was making anyway. Meanwhile, other readers have responded with very harsh comments about the author’s ideas and personal character based not on having read her book, but solely on this blogger’s review. They accuse her of ignoring or confusing very obvious and important issues that she does, in fact, address at length but which the blogger simply did not bother to mention. As a reviewer on a blog, where replies and feedback are more easily exchanged than in a traditional print format, it seems to me this blogger has the responsibility to step up and correct these false accusations, or at least encourage people to read the book anyway, even if they think they’ll disagree with it.

Jerks. Sometimes I hate the blogosphere.

~ by Ali on January 6, 2009.