‘Shut up!’: bad reviews and unfair critics are hurting the social sciences
A bad habit Once I have finished reading an interesting, moving, insightful or informative book, I often search for conversations, reviews or commentary on the work. This happens almost involuntarily, without my intending to do so, and is a bad habit that refuses to die. Unfortunately for me, what I often find, especially if the book happens to touch on a politically sensitive topic (or, actually, not even so, as you will see shortly), is hypermodern intellectual nihilism of the kind that makes you despair of the future of writing and thinking. Unfair critics In Act 2 of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , the listless protagonists Vladimir and Estragon decide to kill time by hurling insults at one another. The jokey tirade continues for a while with the two men hurling the choicest abuses at each other until they reach climax with the biggest insult they can muster: “critic!” This article is about recent encounters with frustratingly bad reviews of books...