The Life and Death of the Book Review

A crisis with a long pedigree

David A. Bell traces book reviewing’s ailments back centuries: snark and savagery in the 18th century, a timidity of praise a century later, and mid-20th-century blandness that literary veterans lamented. The melancholy refrain is familiar — reviewers accused of either tearing authors apart or of offering “sweet, bland commendations.” Bell’s piece argues that these stylistic complaints once mattered only as aesthetic quarrels. Now the stakes are institutional. Who gets to tell us what to read? And who even cares?

The Amazon effect and a breach of trust

Bell recalls a scandal that crystallized his unease: it has been reported that Orlando Figes allegedly posted pseudonymous praise for his own work on Amazon and denigrated rivals — a moment that felt like a betrayal to insiders. It has been reported that Amazon now controls over half the American book market, and the platform’s user reviews have blurred the line between popular opinion and professional judgment. One-star carves and five-star pats — that’s the new public square. The result: a populist recalibration of cultural authority, with influencers and clubs often steering tastes more than critics.

The hollowing out of serious venues

Mainstream review pages are shrinking. Bell notes that once-weekly magazines that regularly carried multiple long-form reviews now publish less frequently, with far fewer reviews per issue. It has been reported that Jeff Bezos cut the Washington Post’s dedicated book section, leaving the New York Times as the last major daily with a standalone weekly book review — and even there coverage skews toward best-known authors and the “big five” publishers. In 2024, eight of the Times’ “ten best” books reportedly came from a single press: Penguin Random House. Money, advertising, and algorithms are reordering what gets read.

What’s at stake

This isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. The emotional core of Bell’s essay is a sense of loss — not just of page space, but of a public practice that demanded serious engagement, disagreement, and risk. We can quibble about whether critics were ever saints. But when the critical ecosystem collapses into celebrity endorsements, rubber-stamp praise, or anonymous thumbs-ups, readers lose a forum for testing ideas. Is that a small price for convenience? Bell thinks not. And if you care about books as conversation rather than commodity, that question may sting.

Sources: libertiesjournal.com, Hacker News