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.

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⁽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.