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Critical Condition

Date: December 4, 2007
Author: James Wolcott
QUOTE: Faint Praise begins. "They have been frustrating people ever since.... For two centuries reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers themselves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, illiterate, or dull. Generally, the argument runs, American reviewing has never been worse." Pool cites a well-known essay by Elizabeth Hardwick published in Harper's in 1959 titled "The Decline of Book Reviewing," which read like a requiem then; and yet here we are, almost a half-century later, still crabbing and singing the same old blues.

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