Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Cohan and Dishonest Writing, Brodhead and Dishonest Reviewing, and the Role of Amazon Reviewing
The
reviewing William Cohan’s THE PRICE OF SILENCE on Amazon has reached the
Washington POST blogger Radley Balko:
Financial reporter William Cohan has
a long book out this month that bills itself as a fresh look at the Duke
lacrosse case. But judging from early reviews, it’s more of an attempt to
rehabilitate the reputation of disgraced former Durham County district attorney
Mike Nifong and his role in the Duke lacrosse case. Early reaction to the book
has been telling: The book has received mostly glowing reviews from the New
York Times, Salon,
the Economist and
the Wall
Street Journal. Cohan also pulled off the rare triple
play of publishing: He received starred reviews from Kirkus,
Publishers Weekly and Booklist. But the book also has received some harsh
criticism. In fact, just as rare as the triple-starred review is to see a book
so warmly reviewed by critics get so thoroughly trashed on Amazon. After
45 reviews, Cohen’s book currently has an aggregate 1.8 stars out of a
possible 5. Of the 45 reviews so far, 35 have given him the lowest possible
score. [It’s 41 one-star out of 51 right now, 7 five-star and 3 four-star.]
On an Amazon comment that seems to have
been removed, Grandjete rebutted someone’s idea that people were ganging up on
Cohan. Well, as far as I know there’s no campaign against Cohan the way
teenagers choose a victim to bully on Facebook. Most of the 1-star reviewers
seem to be people who knew enough about the Duke-Durham scandal of 2006 to remember
that the DA, Mike Nifong, was disbarred and forced to spend a token night in
jail. The rogue prosecutor image stuck in people’s minds, and many remembered
the frantic, ferocious behavior of the Gang of 88—Duke professors who fired up
hatred of the accused lacrosse players. It was hard to forget the images of the
banner that said CASTRATE. Besides the general readers who posted on Cohan’s
book on Amazon there were bloggers who keep in touch with the still on-going
(infinitely delayed) trials and the subsequent adventures of the stripper who
falsely accused a varying set of lacrosse players of a varying set of crimes
and is now in jail for murder. Cohan upset a lot of the bloggers, including me,
by quoting Nifong in a long, long, self-justification marked by foul-mouthed
religiosity and interviewing the false accuser Mangum (who seemed “more petite
and attractive than I expected”) and allowing her to spin yet more fantasies
for his book. (I recognize several of these bloggers in the Amazon reviews.) In
my review and my comments I was outraged and pained by Cohan’s strange
heartlessness and his persistent snarkiness toward the lacrosse players and
their families. Anyhow, Grandjete mentioned that I was a Pulitzer finalist and
a former history professor. In my comment I corrected that last part. My
comment on Amazon reviewing along with Grandjete’s disappeared last night, so I
resurrect it here with the addition of a few lines about myself as a victim of
dishonest reviewing.
Grandjete, thanks for your refuting idea that the one-star reviews suggest there is a "campaign" against THE PRICE OF SILENCE--though there is no doubt that many people keeping up with the Duke-Durham case will speak out when something as contemptible as Cohan's book is published. I had better say that although I could well have been a historian and perhaps would have been happier in a history department, I was in an English department when I was named one of the two Pulitzer finalists for biography in 1997--that year the prize went to a work marketed in the UK and Ireland as fiction, Angela's Ashes! Moriarty [this was a previous commenter], I also won two times the highest award from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division. I am a serious scholar who signs his own name to reviews on Amazon. I have thought a lot about the importance of Amazon reviewing, even as I read about some of the problems with gangs of posters praising or damning books and the scandal of “reviewers” who get review copies in return for 5-star reviews. Amazon is so important in the new world of publishing and reviewing that in the 2013 MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (p. 532) I say: "Even if dishonest publishers hire people to write positive reviews, honest reviewers can still do what [Richard B.] Schwartz do, sign our real names to anything we post as an Amazon review. Along with literary bloggers and litblogs, reviewing in Amazon or any future similar site will go far to make up for the decline in the number and quality of print reviewing." I had Schwartz in mind because we had corresponded, on Amazon, about the importance of signing our names to reviews.
You don't always get honest
reviewing even in the best mainstream media organs now or even the most famous
academic journals. Let me make the previous sentence more truthful: You don’t
often get honest, well-informed reviewing in the “best” mainstream media organs
now, and certainly not in the most famous academic journals. Look, recently, at
the way the new biography of Paul de Man has been minimized so as to
rehabilitate de Man. Look at the puff pieces (as Stuart Taylor, Jr., call them
them) which greeted Cohan’s book. It is no secret that I still am pained by the
damage to my reputation from the Dean of Yale College who lied about me in the
NEW YORK TIMES on 23 June 2002, suggesting that I had fantasized my story--that
only I "in my black hole" had heard of the book Melville finished in
1860 and called POEMS, while in fact every Melville scholar and many critics
had known about it since 1922. There’s not another word: he lied about me. The
Dean of Yale College, never a "scholar" but only a critic, and a
superficial as well as supercilious one at that, in this case the author of a
dishonest review, was Richard H. Brodhead, who later went to Duke. I take
honest reviewing very seriously, in Amazon or anywhere.
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