Historical Reviews
Patrick O’Brien reviews history reviewers, finds them wanting and recommends reform.
Let me begin with heuristic hyperbole! Most of the reviews of scholarly publications in history that appear in newspapers and weeklies, as well as on radio and television, provide an unsatisfactory service for readers, are unhelpful to authors, disappoint publishers and are an unreliable guide to the contents, quality and significance of too many history books.
Book reviews originally accompanied the rise of the author in the eighteenth century and were addressed to an elite who purchased books across the arts and sciences. Though not written by scholars, they engaged with a work of history in ways that exposed the interesting features of a book and displayed the erudition and style of the reviewer.
Today’s popular reviews perform a similar function. Most professional historians are disdainful of the media, and for good reasons. Such reviews – rarely of the most important books within the discipline – are too short and are composed by a ‘tenured’ coterie of articulate literati whose credentials to summarise, contextualise and appraise the range of history they presume to comment upon are entirely questionable.
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