The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History by The New York Times

The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History Reviews

• 
  Kevin

  “Life is worth living because there are books, and so let us open a tome with a happy thought, even if it were written by Schopenhauer.” ~Editor’s Note, NYT Book Review 1897
  
  Editors Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim have crafted a 368 page, 600 lb. behemoth of reviews, interviews, editorials, letters, biographies, photos, and illustrations. This is a bibliophile’s biblio-file; a select anthology of the best (and a few of the worst) book reviews of the New York Times, 1896 to 2021.
  
  Chapter One, 1896 - 1921
  
  Most of the very early reviews are from anonymous sources (bylines don’t seem to be prevalent until around 1924). This was both a blessing and a curse: A blessing because reviewers could speak out against social injustices without fear of reprisals; a curse because reviewers could occasionally be remorseless and cruel with little or no backlash (of course, now that I think about it, this is exactly what often happens on Goodreads).
  
  “Of course there are in every community, and in an American community in larger numbers than in any other except a British, plenty of people endowed with a heaven-born itch for minding other people’s business. The less they know about the business the more eager they are to mind it…” ~Editor’s Note on Censorship, NYT 1902
  
  Featured authors of this period include George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
  
  Chapter Two, 1921 - 1946
  
  “…even if the Germans were to get away with a lenient peace this coagulated stench will stick to them for the rest of their national history-a fate truly worse than death.” ~William S. Schlamm on Mein Kampf, NYT Book Review, 1943
  
  Featured authors include Agatha Christie, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Countee Cullen, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, Ann Petry, and Christopher Isherwood.
  
  Chapter Three, 1946 - 1971
  
  “In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The “get-ahead” principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion…” ~Tennessee Williams on The Sheltering Sky, NYT Book Review, 1949
  
  Featured authors include John Hersey, J.D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Frank, E.B. White, Ryunosuke Akitagawa, Simone de Beauvoir, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Eugene O’Neill, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Rachel Carson, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Frantz Fanon, Jean Toomer, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Robert Hayden, and Jacqueline Susann.
  
  Chapter Four, 1971 - 1996
  
  “I would think to myself… that the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” ~Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, NYT Book Review, 1990
  
  Featured authors include John Updike, Nikki Giovanni, Stephen King, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Vincent Bugliosi, Shere Hite, John Cheever, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Art Spiegelman, Toni Morrison, Randy Shilts, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros, and Jackie Collins.
  
  Chapter Five, 1996 - 2021
  
  “No marriage is as arbitrary and accidental as one between a writer and a reader, set up by a brief infatuation in a bookstore or the enthusiasm of a third party.” ~Caleb Crain on Interpreter of Maladies, NYT Book Review, 1999
  
  Featured authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, J.K. Rowling, Zadie Smith, Alice Sebold, Miguel de Cervantes, Alison Bechdel, André Aciman, Haruki Murakami, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Robert A. Caro, Celeste Ng, Jacqueline Woodson, Walter Mosley, Lucia Berlin, Colson Whitehead, Tommy Orange, David Sedaris, and Jericho Brown
  
  _______________________________
  
  Smash-Mouth Criticism
  
  Critic John Leonard points out that the reason we see so many “slash-and-burn” critiques is because they are easy to write. For those of us who rate and review, he offers these six rules of engagement:
  
  1. As in Hippocrates, do no harm.
  2. Never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle.
  3. Always understand that in this symbiosis, you are a parasite.
  4. Look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book.
  5. Use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill.
  6. Let a hundred Harolds Bloom.
  
  Sage advice.
• 
  Jim

  A really well-curated collection of reviews, essays, letters to the editor, ads, photos, and more from 125 years of the New York Times Book Review. Some of my favorite stuff:
  - a letter from an angry reader who is tired of the Book Review’s worship of Rudyard Kipling (and the two responses to the letter) (page 40)
  - an interview that reveals the origin of Sherlock Holmes (page 52)
  - a crazy story about Agatha Christie that I can’t believe I’d never heard before
  - predictions from the 50th anniversary (1946) about what the Book Review would be like on it’s 100th anniversary (1996)
  
  The jewel of this collection is a 1943 review by William Schlamm of an English translation of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which includes an explanation of the difficulties in getting a good translation: “Up to now, every self-respecting translator (and they are a proud lot) dependably stumbled into the pitfall: he rendered the Hitler text in such a way that it made sense. The reason, of course, was the translator’s respect not for the strange subject but for his own language. And, indeed, to make Hitler sound in English as he does in German is more than one can expect from a translator who cares to stay in the business. … Here, for the first time, you get Hitler’s prose almost as unreadable in English as it is in German.”
  
  That is just a small taste of Schlamm’s brilliantly witty review so even if you decide not to read this book you should read the review itself, which you can find here if you are a Times subscriber -
  https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/time...
  
  Reading through some of the later reviews collected here I’m reminded why I don’t like to read fiction book reviews - Beloved and Love in the Time of Cholera are good examples of reviewers giving away the entire plot of the novel in their review. It’s maddening.
  
  Like any good book about books, this will send you down a ton of rabbit holes. I really enjoyed it.
  
• 
  John

  The best part of this book is that you read reviews of books that had just come out and were not as yet considered classics — thus, you get a “real time” capture of a work early in its classic life. Examples of this include Faulkner’s Light in August, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Heller’s Catch-22. You also get first reviews of books like The Godfather, Carrie, and Deliverance, and a scattering of essays by various authors interposed. This is a book to peruse and read over a period of time.
• 
  Rama Rao

  An appraisal of NY Times book reviews
  
  We get a view of book reviews of the earliest years in the history of NY Times and its coverage in shaping the literature. The reviews encourage debate and exchange of ideas. An editor's note from 1897 points out, "Life is worth living because there are books.” The reviews became more opinionated, broader, and deeper since 1925. Some of the reprinted reviews in this book are edited for clarity and to shorten them. One can read errors, insensitivity, race and gender bias, and misunderstood masterpieces of their time. The inaugural issue of the book review started in 1896. In the early days, reviewers never used the term "I" that was discouraged by the newspaper, but the magisterial "we" was encouraged, like for example, what flaws did "we" discover in this promising book.
  
  Some examples of reviews are as follows: An unnamed critic wrote about Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” "Shall we frankly declare that after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin's arguments, we remain unconvinced.” In 1948, a reviewer dismissed Gore Vidal's novel “The City and the Pillar” as "pornography" not because of sexual content but because it was about the shame of two gay men in love. In the review of Christopher Isherwood’s’ “Novella Goodbye to Berlin” and the character of Sally Bowles, both of which inspired the musical and movie Cabaret. NYT reviewer gave a mixed praise for the author's gifts: "Isherwood is a real novelist, a real minor novelist." For Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 book “Interpreter of Maladies” Caleb Crain gave a lukewarm review for author’s plain language.
  
  “The Souls of Black Folk” a 1903 work by W. E. B. Du Bois, which is a seminal work in American history and a cornerstone of African-American literature used the term "double consciousness" applying it to the idea that Black people must always have two fields of vision. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how whites view them. The NYT review contains significant use of “N” word, in fact, eight times in the first paragraph alone, and there are eight paragraphs in the book review, which illustrates the height of bigotry even at New York Times. The unnamed reviewer largely focuses on the rivalry of W.E.B. Du Bois with Booker T. Washington who were two dominant leaders of African Americans, and NYT takes the side of Washington for his views that African Americans would be better off to remain separate from whites than to attempt desegregation as long as whites granted Black Americans access to economic progress and education. In 1981,Toni Morrison stated that "I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don't care if the critic likes or dislikes it."
  
  The book is significantly edited and not all NYT book reviews are found. It is of historical interest to read as how African American authors were treated in literary world.
  
• 
  Michael Ritchie

  Disappointing. I expected more actual reproductions of reviews, articles, covers, and even ads. The reproductions we do get are tiny, and instead, we get mostly excerpts and lots of photographs that are often not relevant. Very glad I read a library copy and didn't splurge on this.
• 
  Furrawn

  A great idea that fell short on the execution. Such fascinating stuff yet a page would be wasted with a single paragraph in HUGE letters. Another page would have a newspaper clipping so small that even the iphone 13 pro max could not magnify it to legibility before the fuzziness of magnification re-rendered it to an illegible state.
  
  The idea and some of the content was truly fab. Unfortunately, the execution was a fail.
  
  Expect to be frustrated and you’ll find some great things in this book.
  
  
• 
  Barry

  This is a mostly self-congratulatory compilation of entries from the 125-year history of the NYT Book Review. It’s a big coffee table book, and entertaining to read in small doses. The focus here is almost exclusively on fiction, with a smattering of biography.
  
  It’s often interesting to see how novels which are now widely regarded as classics were first received. Sometimes their greatness was recognized immediately. But for others the first reviews were amusingly mediocre.
• 
  Lynn

  Pure Pleasure
  
  I’ve been a fan of The New York Times Book Review since I was a kid in the 70s. I still read it today. Really loved this book and it was so wonderful to read. I can’t recommend it enough!
• 
  Dan Trefethen

  Well, it's really a coffee table book with the full page author photos and occasional graphic representations of reviews, but the guts of the book are the meaty historical reviews, some by famous authors themselves.
  
  They highlight some swings and misses (Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22), but mostly celebrate the acknowledged successes that have held up over time. This is a book where a reader can browse, looking for the original reviews of favorite books to see what the NYT reviewer thought about it at the time.
  
  There's some self-examination here, as they acknowledge they were late to catch up to the importance of literature by Black authors. While there are some reviews of gay issues (notably the non-fiction account “And the Band Played On” about the AIDS crisis), there seems to be a lack of representation of alternative voices. It's mostly white, male, and largely American authors who were reviewed in the past 125 years. The women authors tend to be intellectuals, some writing about feminist issues, some about women's sexuality (“The Hite Report”). There's very little coverage of LGBTQIA+ texts or authors.
  
  Still, it's a fun book to leaf through, and might actually inspire a reader to revisit a book, or get around to reading that classic 20th century text they'd been meaning to get t
• 
  Nan

  The New York Times Book Review's 125th anniversary in 2021 gave rise to this hefty collection of actual reviews, articles, and interviews from its storied history. Seeing how The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird and tons more were originally reviewed is a treat. (Incidentally, Anne of Green Gables and Catch-22 were among those panned.) An extensive piece about the history of the publication also comes to terms with its slowness in covering diverse writers. Yes, you can check this volume out of the library, but it's so extensive it's worth purchasing so you can savor it a bit at a time. A gem.
• 
  Maksim Karpitski

  It's an exceptionally illuminating book, in that, insubstantial as it is, this collection of snippets does let one see how vapid and narrow-minded the criticism of this most esteemed magazine mostly was. Indeed, it's the fitting reflection of its white male upper middle-class values and a suitable subject for a Wes Anderson movie. Since he already did The New Yorker, well, why not this some day.
  One of the most intelligent pieces here is the second introduction, A Review of the Review, written by Parul Sehgal.
• 
  Scott Eggerding

  I got this book as a gift for Christmas and, at the risk of alienating my family, I read it straight through. Reading the first impressions of books we now call classics was compelling and thrilling. As a weekly reader of the book review for nearly 30 years and an occasional reader before then, the sheer volume of books that are published and the small percentage that get reviewed make the Review a true bell weather of literary permanence. I enjoyed reading when the reviewer missed a classic, but was even more impressed when someone “got it right” from the start. Of course there are many missing books and important missing authors, so maybe there will be a sequel!
• 
  Heather Mize

  This book is a treasure trove. Boom reviews, many by authors, pictures of authors, pictures of books, interviews with authors!
  
  There are a few misses - certain books not showcased that probably didn’t make it past the chopping block in what I imagine was a tough edit. But my goodness! It’s so brilliantly designed and compiled. I’m absolutely in love with this book!
  
  
  The only downside is the lack of an index. But seriously…who is complaining!
• 
  Thomas

  The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History. Edited by Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim. Clarkson, 2021.
  For its 125th anniversary, New York Times editors put out a coffee-table tribute to themselves just in time for Christmas last year. I suspect this is a book more often briefly sampled and thumbed through for its vintage pictures than read all the way through. It is limited as a reference book because there is no index, but if you forgo its heft for an electronic copy, there is always word search.
  That said, the book is filled with satisfying tidbits. In the early days, the Review concentrated on what it called “Books as News,” often celebrity news, because early twentieth-century authors were more often celebrities than they are these days. As important a writer as Toni Morrison never got the attention to her personal life that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald received. Early author interviews have a more refrained tone than some of the earlier discussions. There is nothing to match the early 20th-century “Authors at Home” interviews with writers like Arthur Conan Doyle. Truman Capote talks interestingly about how he came to write In Cold Blood, but he does not exhibit the exuberance that made him a late-night talk-show star.
  Recently, there have been more long-form essays in the manner of the New York Review of Books—which, by the way, should do a book like this. Several important novelists and public figures have written for the Review, among them Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Bill Clinton. Especially impressive are Margaret Atwood’s appreciation of Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon’s review of Love in the Time of Cholera.
  Of course, reviewers get it wrong sometimes. The Review ignored The Waste Land, was baffled without appreciating Finnegans Wake, and did not see any merit to Catch-22. Unsurprisingly, the editors feature reviews that got it right and give themselves a well-deserved pat on the back. 4 stars.
  
• 
  Gary Sassaman

  I will confess that I didn't read all of this fascinating history of the storied (pun definitely intended) New York Times Book Review. It isn't the kind of book you read cover to cover, to be honest, but it is certainly one to be savored. Wonderfully designed, this treasure trove of essays, reprints, photos, covers, and yes—book reviews—is doled out in bite-size segments arranged in chronological order from the paper's first tentative stabs at exploring book reviews and reporting on the publishing scene to its current status as the paper of record (at least each Sunday in the Book Review section). I gravitated most to the segments about books I read and authors I've loved and you will, too, but it's great to see how the Book Review section grew and evolved over the last century and a quarter. It's a bit pricey (I got it as a gift ... thank god for Wishlists), but I guarantee if you sit down with this book in a library or bookstore, time will pass quickly as you page through it and stop and read the segments that grab you. One minor quibble: Ken Tucker's review of Art Spiegelman's MAUS doesn't include any illustrations from that ground-breaking graphic novel, even though it seems to be in awe of the fact that the reviewer is talking about comics ("Does it seem odd to speak of comic strips in such serious terms?"), although he does acknowledge the medium's popularity in Europe and Japan. Since Tucker talks in length about the illustrative style of Spiegelman's work, it would have been nice to include a panel or two or even a page (this may be a problem in this book only ... I'm not sure if the original review—published in 1985—featured any art; the review was based on Spiegelman's original Maus stories in his self-published comics magazine, RAW).
• 
  Connie Ciampanelli

  A Christmas gift from my husband, The New York Times Book Review: 125 Year of Literary History is a treasure, one that I will keep close at hand forevermore.
  
  Visually stunning, this compendium, which spans NYT book reviews from 1896 to 2021, is overflowing with endlessly fascinating material. Almost a scrapbook in its design, it is chock full of original reviews, thoughtful essays, fun ephemera, and a well-chosen selection of letters to the editor. Full page portraits of authors, both black and white and in full color, from George Bernard Shaw in 1889 to David Sedaris in 2020, fill every chapter. (The study of William Faulkner took my breath away). Included in each section are wonderful b&w photos of people reading in a wide variety of settings.
  
  From Henry James' plays (1896) to Tommy Orange's There There (2021), reviews run the gamut, of course, from raves to hatchet jobs. Of particular fun is reading reviews of older, well known and revered (or not) books as they were initially assessed. So too is reading authors' reviews of their peers' work.
  
  This is a volume, once read from cover to cover, to be dipped into and relished time and time again. It is a bottomless delight for any book lover.
  
  
• 
  Matt Ely

  You read this book because you like reading about reading books. And you like reading the writing of the kinds of people who like reading books.
  
  You also like looking at books. This book has many pictures of books and pictures of the people who write books. Sometimes the pictured people who write books also write about the books they've written or respond in writing to the writings of those who wrote about the books that they've written.
  
  You also like old things and this thing is old. The best things about this thing are the old things, the ones that make you feel like you're tapping into an ancient throughline, that you're participating in something broad and noble. It feels less good when to you when the notes are more modern and you see yourself as you are and the times which you understand and are unable to romanticize the otherness of this library book with pretty pictures.
  
  You also like that this book has inspired you to check out so many other books from the library. It's fun to hold and it's full of books. And you like that. Not enough to need to spend more time with it, but enough.
• 
  Robin

  This is a fascinating look at the development of the review over the years. Its beginnings are humble and I appreciate the work of those who saw its value, making it what it is today. Astoundingly an early controversy centered on what books were appropriate for women! Some books, popular when published, have disappeared while some that weren't widely read when published are now classics. If you need inspiration for titles, this is a good one to check for ideas. My TBR is overly full but I did make note of some authors to check.
• 
  Kier Scrivener

  I really loved seeing the first reviews of influenctial books and ones forgotten by history. It is a love letter to history and literary history. And also confronts it's own history in silencing and ridiculing minorities and mostly reviewing books by white men.
  
  I would recommend it to any book lover!
  
  And on a side note how much love The Haunting of Hill House made me so happy! It's full of reviews, interviews, letters to the editors, and all the fun and sass of reviewing.
• 
  Valerie Sherman

  Read this to get ideas for my list for next year, but it's so much more. I didn't know that authors sometimes published reviews, such as frequent critics Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion. I didn't know about the legendary exchange between Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. They also showed when the review missed the mark on books that would become beloved. Very interesting to read.
• 
  Diana N.

  A great book for book lovers/reviewers!
  
  It was very interesting to see some of the original reviews of books that we now consider classics. The photos in this book are great as well and show several of the reviews in the original newspaper print.
  
  The only thing I would have liked was more content in the recent years like that of past decades. Overall a fun book to have!
• 
  Kevin McAvoy

  NYT Book Review has very good reviews and I have often found my next read in it's pages. This 125 years of certain reviews was interesting. Some of the reviews were very funny. I found 2 old books which I will check out. It also shows the first edition covers and the style of artwork has changed with the times.
• 
  Meg

  125 years of book reviews. The editor chose a wide variety books and authors. I love hearing about new books, but this is so much more. It is a time capsule of American Literature. Even more fun is the variety of people who wrote the columns. Some life long reporters. Some famous authors themselves. Hearing about old favorites from the perspective of the times they were written in was absolutely fascinating.
• 
  Jackson

  An entertaining and enlightening coffee table book for any bibliophile to peruse. I particularly enjoyed the story about Agatha Christie going missing (yes, for real– like something out of one of her novels!), the unabashed lambasting of Catch-22, and the review of The Catcher in the Rye written as if narrated by Holden Caulfield.
• 
  Bobbi Galvin

  A "delightful" (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.
  This was a thick one! Too much for me to read all in one sitting, but it would be awesome as a gift for any bibliophile.