In an Amazonian (online) book world — the merit of thoughtfully negative book reviews

25 April 2017

With my three-year Germany assignment about to end, I noticed that a high proportion of the books that I bought online from the United States — sight unseen — were not good enough to keep:

Too many were inadequately reasoned, lacked source attributions, or stacked unexplained and unwarranted assumptions.

Others flaunted unendingly unimportant minutiae or were too argumentatively long-winded.

And many missed grappling with reasonably obvious core issues, or simply offended with poor physical quality and absent white-space formatting.

As a result — I have come to prioritize intelligently negative book reviews

In the beginning, I selected books on the basis of proportionately high numbers of favorable Amazon and Goodreads reviews.

After receiving some blatantly lousy books on that basis, I modified the favorable proportion technique to include a careful search of 1 and 2 star opinions.

I looked for those that:

(a) were intelligently set out

and

(b) reflected an appreciation for cogency.

But even that was not enough.

Today, I find it necessary to dominantly weight these thoughtfully negative opinions. If I find a persuasive one, I avoid buying the book.

This is not, I think, just a matter of intellectual taste. Being older, I recognize that favorably evaluated bullshit is the currency of our realm. And the more verbose and intellectually disorganized the BS, the happier our Herd appears to be.

Ergo, the value of discriminating (read curmudgeonly) outliers.

The merit of surly discrimination — an example

The following history book is superbly researched and nicely written. But its 736 pages drowned me in irrelevant, poorly cobbled together, brain-deadening minutiae:

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Harper, 2013)

Reading this thing is like re-living every inconsequential second of the history it documents. Sleepwalking is a great example of the kind of book that I like to avoid wasting money on.

Had I thought (early in my Germany assignment) to look, the proportionately few negative reviews would have warned me:

(1) This book should be marketed as a cure for insomnia.

No matter the thoroughness and accuracy of detail, the timeline is so poorly constructed, the content so bone dry, the presentation of events so downright confusing, and the overwhelming minute detail of biographical information so completely over the top as to render this book virtually useless to the average reader, like me.

A history scholar might appreciate the painstaking level of detail here. But a captivating or informative read for the casual reader it is not.

(2) What an apt title... this book is a BORE!

I skimmed through many sections dealing with tedious personal anecdotes of meetings, letters, and personal proclivities (mistresses, girlfriends, yacht races, etc.) of all the diplomats that seemed only tangential to the subject at hand.

It is as if he felt he had to dump all his research into diplomatic correspondence on us without any overarching organization.

It truly fogs up the issues at hand, and doesn't leave one any clarity as to why Europe went to war.

Or this one from Goodreads:

Clark's theory is that foreign policy decision-making in the governments of Europe was diffuse, and many actors in each government had their fingers in the pie. Some of these actors were quite low-level, and yet were able to wield enormous power over decision-making.

To support his thesis, Clark beats the dead horse about 1,000,000 times with endless case studies of crisis after pre-war crisis.

Never does Clark show that these mini-crises had an influence on the crisis of July 1914, nor does he show that they locked in the diffuse decision-making processes that he documents so clearly.

In my view — as someone originally trained to be a historian — the whole point to writing History is to provide synopsizing overviews that grasp a cognizable essence of at least something.

Excellent historians winnow out the extraneous, so as to highlight what arguably mattered. Sorting pith from drivel.

Sleepwalking's excessively long paragraphs and missing white space just add to the annoyance presented by wading through its interminably poorly organized blithering.

Since I already know a fair amount about the origin of World War I, I saw nothing in Clark that added anything insightful to the pile. I gave up after thoroughly reading approximately one third of his book, including most of that fraction's footnotes.

This does not mean that Sleepwalking is not a genuinely superb resource. Or that the book would not delight readers with different intellectual emphases than mine.

It just means that Professor Clark is not (with regard to this one book, at least) a memorably effective historian.

There is a difference between displaying admirable research and recording abilities, on the one hand, and being luminously cogent, on the other.

The moral? — Intelligent negativity has worth

The Herd rarely sifts for lucidity in books (or anything else).

Ergo, the value of the thoughtfully negative book reviews. Pointlessness avoided puts a smile on my time-spotted face.

PeteFree.com

In an Amazonian (online) book world — the merit of thoughtfully negative book reviews