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Why you should (almost) never write a negative book review

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Negative book reviews are great fun to read. There’s a dark delight to be found in a comprehensive take-down of a book, especially if you side with the reviewer. The Schadenfreude is even more delicious if you happen to dislike the book’s author. It’s a guilty pleasure but I’m not going to deny that it’s still a pleasure. Notable examples include the demolition job on Boris Johnson’s life of Churchill, the fierce rebuttal of Michael Behe’s misleading account of the impossibility of evolution, or the Amazon reviews of the worst photo album ever. You finish reading each of these feeling not only happier but wiser(1).

With all that in mind, I strongly believe that you should avoid ever writing or publishing a negative book review. I was a book reviews editor at a journal for around 10 years and of the hundreds of reviews I handled, only a smattering were negative. I regret publishing all of them and openly apologise for my role in bringing them into the literature(2). Years ago I wrote a negative review myself, for a different journal, and the editor made the shrewd decision not to publish it, for which I remain grateful.

My current opinion on negative reviews is shaped by being a book author myself, and recognising the amount of time, sacrifice and personal investment that goes into bringing a book into publication. Even a bad book. Even, quite frankly, an utterly irredeemable and worthless book. If you haven’t written a book yourself then you should take pause before criticising anyone who has. They at least had the personal drive to create something and place it before the world.

Writing a bad review carries costs for the author, and also costs for you. On the author’s side, you are damaging their reputation and (potentially) their income(3). The more people read your review, the fewer are likely to buy the book, and the author will become known as having produced a bad book. If this is an early-career researcher, or their first book, the results can be devastating for a career. There is a name on the front of the book, it’s a real person, and your comments are inevitably directed at them. The greater your reputation and status, the more harmful your critiques become.

On the other hand, beyond the time and energy required to write a bad review, there are also further costs to the reviewer. You become someone who writes mean reviews, and we can all make judgements about the type of person who criticises others in public. Even if no-one challenges you openly, there’s a good chance that you will lose friends or reputation in the process. Whether or not I agreed with them about a particular review I would think twice about collaborating with someone who was willing to write a negative book review (this is a decision I have acted upon).

There are features of a book which make it bad, at least to you as a reader, but which don’t deserve a bad review. These include that the book was poorly written, you disagree with the conclusions, you have a personal dislike of the author (however well-founded), or that there are mistakes on points of detail.

In all these cases, there’s a simple thing you can do, which is to not write a review. No-one is forcing you to. If you’ve been invited to review a book then you can decline, return any commission fee, and just walk away. Consider the sage advice of every grandmother that if you have nothing nice to say then you should say nothing. Over the years a few reviewers came back to me with variants on this. If the book is simply bad then there’s no point in giving it the attention that comes from a review. Just let it fade away, unread and unrecognised, amongst the thousands of books that are published across the world every single day.

There are a few exceptional cases where a negative book review might be warranted, so it’s not an absolute never, but there are specific and stringent conditions. These include:

  • The author is rich, famous and established, and well able to stand up for themselves. For example, I would have no qualms about criticising someone like Richard Dawkins in print. This could however be a reason not to write a bad review because people with deep pockets and reputations to defend can fight back, so proceed with due caution.
  • The book is catastrophically, dangerously wrong. Here the facts and evidence have to be absolutely clear, independently verifiable and iron-clad beyond being subject to interpretation or opinion. A book disputing the public health benefits of vaccination, or denying the negative effects of climate change, needs to be stamped on in any available outlet. Mistakes or differences of opinion don’t count; the required level is that of putting lives at risk.
  • The book has implications or conclusions that are themselves dangerous. This is slightly different to the above, as it accepts that the book might have contents that are defensible or at least open to interpretation. For example, the notorious book about human intelligence The Bell Curve contained data on IQ that were not themselves incorrect(4). The real problems were the assumptions made about what IQ actually measures, ignorance of the enormous amount of prejudice embedded in the test, and the lessons that were drawn from an analysis of inherently biased data. The problem with eugenics is not so much that it gets the genetics wrong, it’s that genetic arguments are used to advance causes which are themselves morally reprehensible(5).

Even if one of these applies, ask yourself a few questions before doing so. Are you the right person to be writing the review, and can your status or credentials protect you against any possible backlash? Do you have a vested interest, meaning your case could be undermined by accusations of bias? Might there be any legal consequences to the criticisms you are making if they could be construed as defamatory or damaging to the author’s livelihood? Are there other more informal avenues to responding to this book which won’t attract the same repercussions? Most of all, are you completely sure that you are right and able to defend every word in your review? Even if all these things are true the possible costs of being behind a negative review might outweigh any benefits that come from its publication.

If you do find yourself desperate to write a negative book review then my advice is to follow the same procedure as for angry letters. Take the time to write your best, most thorough and damning indictment of the book. Then file it away and move on with the rest of your life. It’s not worth it.

(1) There are some which verge on the spiteful, such as this recent takedown of Ocean Vuong, which are pure entertainment.

(2) A general apology is largely performative so if you’re reading this and feel like you deserve a personal one for something that I’ve published then I am very willing to do so and to make amends if possible.

(3) Although not as much as you might think. Most authors are lucky to receive 10% of the cover charge of a full-price book, and often only after various fees have been paid off. Most of us don’t write books for the money. Nor for the fame. Or the career benefits. In fact, writing books is one of the least well-remunerated things you can choose to do with your professional life.

(4) Please do not read this as in any sense a defence of The Bell Curve, a disgraceful and appalling tract used as a crutch by racial eugenicists. The issue isn’t whether you can measure and analyse differences in IQ, because obviously you can, it’s whether or not you should.

(5) This is not to say that eugenic theory didn’t misunderstand or misrepresent population genetics, so much as that its early proponents included enough elements of fact to appear reasonable and defensible. Hindsight is a hanging judge but in the 1950s the evidence was more mixed and the space for what was considered acceptable interpretation was broader. There’s no excuse for it now.

That Glorious Forest

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thatgloriousforest

There’s no denying that Sir Ghillean Prance FRS is one of the most distinguished tropical botanists alive today. His contributions to the scientific literature have been immense, particularly regarding the floral biogeography of Amazonia, not to mention numerous taxonomic identifications and specimens distributed in herbaria throughout the world. For over ten years he was the director of Kew Gardens, one of the foremost centres of plant research and discovery. Moreover, he has conducted 56 expeditions to South America over a long career, with recollections of these forests and the societies contained within them that date back before the incursions of the modern world. His is a story which deserves to be told.

I love reading the memoirs of the great exploratory botanists*. The hardships they willingly accepted in pursuit of plants are an inspiration, along with the thrill of true discovery at a time when so many parts of the globe could only be reached through daring exploits. I’ve been on my fair share of remote expeditions, but in these days of long-haul flights, widespread airports, tarmacked roads and satellite phones, the challenge is now more one of escaping modernity than coping without it. Reading the exploits of our predecessors, before health and safety became the deadening preoccupation of adventurers, is a refreshing antidote.

With such easy material, combined with abundant photographic records, Prance could hardly fail to produce an engaging account of his career in the tropics. And yet… it’s not written in the most gripping style. The opening chapters of That Glorious Forest read something like a school pupil’s summer diary, dominated by mundane observations interspersed with trivial details and almost entirely stripped of the passion and enthusiasm that must surely have driven his work and made such hardships endurable. To take one incident as an example, Prance once found himself spending the night in a jail cell in a remote border town. The potential for a ripping yarn gets even better, as he only ended up there after a fraught flight across the Amazon forest in a dilapidated DC-8 during which first one, then the second engine failed, necessitating an emergency landing. Stranded in a small town with little accommodation, the only place to house them for a night was the local jail. This story would be gold to a biographer. Yet we are told nothing about the reactions of the people on the plane, their emotions, the responses of the people on the ground. Were there prisoners in other cells at the time? How well did everyone manage to sleep? Instead we are told only the sparest details, a plot outline instead of a hair-raising adventure. For once I found myself longing for more information rather than less.

What remains isn’t so much an absorbing account of derring-do in the name of science, but a much-condensed summary, combined with a desire to name and thank everyone with whom his path has crossed. The latter is noble, even endearing, but the general reader gains little from it. As I can vouchsafe from my own expeditions, the most entertaining stories usually derive from the more unpleasant people one ends up encountering, and the same is true here.

If you’re looking for peril, it’s most often associated with a botanist’s greatest fear: plant presses catching fire. The potential loss of hard-won specimens is what keeps any field collector awake at night. I appreciated the details of the plants collected and the stories behind them — these are among the best bits, often infused with emotion. A botanist to the end, each chapter concludes with the accession numbers of all specimens collected over the course of the events described, along with the type specimens for all new species discovered. This makes up an impressive tally.

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Ghillean Prance inspecting the underside of a leaf of Victoria amazonica

As for the adventures themselves, I began to gain the impression that each expedition had been described in the manner of a botanical specimen, each inflorescence reduced to a floral formula; flattened, dessicated and inspected for its features alone. Having never met Prance, I have no idea whether this is typical of either the man or his attitude to life, but given how keen I was to enjoy this book, I was disappointed by the dry writing style. A telling comment appears halfway through, in a passing remark about having met the author Redmond O’Hanlon, whose tales of travels with the Yanomani of Venezuala are one of the great accounts of this region. “I commented that I would be really ashamed to run an expedition like that, but that as a writer, he had to have so many misfortunes to make a good story!” This seems doubly unfair, as there are no shortage of mishaps in Prance’s own travels, but also because these do not in themselves make for a readable account. The photos and illustrations throughout are wonderful, and the production quality is excellent, making it great value for $69. It’s not meant as a coffee-table book though, and therefore doesn’t quite fit that niche either.

That said, there are some genuinely interesting anecdotes. A field trip to collect fruitflies with the great geneticist Dobzhansky was enlivened by his insistence on carrying mashed bananas all the way across Brazil to the Yanomani, whose staple crop is… bananas. He appears to have been a demanding and eccentric guest, though is thought of affectionately enough to be called ‘Dobbie’ throughout.

Some of the best passages involve Prance’s encounters and working relationship with forest-dwelling people. On meeting the Yanomani: “They were curious about us and were stroking my hairy arms and chest, making their clicking noises of appreciation. When they wanted to see more, I just stripped completely and their curiosity was satisfied.” If this sounds strange, then it’s worth remembering that the Yanomani spend their lives naked. One of the fungi they eat translates as hairy-arse fungus. Elsewhere there are intriguing ethnobotanical observations, whose value is underestimated by the modern scientific literature. For example, the Mak\’u people use the milky sap of a fig species (Naucleopsis mello-barretoi) as a poison for blowpipe darts. The toxin is a cardiac glycoside, only known to occur elsewhere in another genus of the Moraceae, and only in New Guinea — where the natives have similarly discovered its utility as  a hunting poison.

If you want to read a book documenting the ethnobotany of the neotropics, and the efforts of bold scientists to describe it, then Wade Davis’ magnificent memoir One River still leads the way. It is informed by his own personal account of travels in search of plants, interspersed with anecdotes and partial biographies of the legendary botanist Richard Evans Schultes and his distinguished student Tim Plowman. It’s a book which, had I read two decades earlier, would have changed the whole trajectory of my career. Schultes never wrote up his own memoirs, while Plowman died tragically young; it took Davis to transform the raw materials of their lives into an appealing narrative. Letting the human story drive the text only served to increase the thrill of the botanical chase behind it. By the end of That Glorious Forest I couldn’t help wishing that Prance had taken a similar approach.

* My next challenge is reading another memoir by a living legend of tropical taxonomy, this time from the Orient — Peter Ashton’s mammoth On the Forests of Tropical Asia. It’s 800 pages long and weighs a tonne though, so don’t expect the review to follow any time soon.