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Tina Jordan is the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review. Before joining The Times, Tina was the longtime books editor at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked since the magazines founding.
Noor Qasim is a writer and editor. From 2020 to 2021, she served as the editing fellow of The New York Times Book Review.
The New York Times is dedicated to helping people understand the world through on-the-ground, expert, and deeply reported independent journalism. Their mission is simple: to seek the truth and help people understand the world. This mission is rooted in their belief that great journalism has the power to make each readers life richer and more fulfilling, and all of society stronger and more just. The Times has received 130 Pulitzer Prizes.
Acknowledgments
It takes a village, right? So many people pitched in to help with this book, which would never have come together without their generosity and expertise.
At Clarkson Potter, our savvy, unflappable editor, Angelin Borsics, took our rough ideas and buffed them to a high shine, showing us what worked, what didnt, what needed to be added, what should be cutand, while she was doing all this, repeatedly performed magic with the production schedule. Thanks to everyone else at Clarkson Potter for their full support, especially Ian Dingman, Jan Derevjanik, Stephanie Huntwork, Francis Lam, Mark McCauslin, Kim Tyner and Aaron Wehner.
At The Times, Im especially grateful to Noor Qasim, who dedicated her year-long stint as an editing fellow at the paper to the Book Reviews 125th anniversary. Her thoughtful, incisive editorial judgment helped me shape the books content, and she took on a lot of detail work (like permissions!) that I did not have time for. Without her, this project simply would not have been possible.
Thanks, too, to John Cruickshank, whocalmly, and with great good humorkept this book on track, even when schedules threatened to veer out of control (they never did, thanks to him!), and to Anika Burgess, photo editor extraordinaire, whose gift for excavating remarkable old photographs can be seen on almost every page. Anikas eye for the tiniest detail saved me again and again.
Many thanks to the head of the Books desk, Pamela Paula passionate advocate for the project from the beginningand David Kelly, our managing editor, for his encyclopedic knowledge of Book Review history. Other Books colleaguesJohn Williams, MJ Franklin, Emily Eakin, Gal Beckerman, Elisabeth Egan, Greg Cowles, Jude Biersdorfer, Alexandra Alter and Andrew LaValleegave me excellent advice and, when things got tough, unflagging support.
Also at The Times, thanks to Jeff Roth, who pulled dozens of old Book Review bound volumes from our photo morgue and delivered them to the photo lab, and to William ODonnell and Sonny Figueroa, who painstakingly scanned countless back issues, negatives and prints, many of them old and fragile. Our thanks also go to our art production team, Steve Brown and David Braun, for so deftly handling such a massive amount of material.
Lee Riffaterre, Irina Starkova and Nick Jollymore provided invaluable advice on clearing textual permissions, a process spearheaded by the resourceful Nick Donofrio. Karen Sutorius, Aaron Tejada and Sarah Borell helped clear photo permissions.
A special thanks to Dara Hauser for feedback that helped make this book more accessible.
Finally, this book would never have come about without Binky Urbanwho found the perfect home for itor Jennifer Parrucci, M. Ryan Murphy and David Dunlap, who were all unstinting with their time when I first arrived at the Times and was teaching myself how to use the archives.
TINA JORDAN
Other Famous Reviewers and Essayists
Kingsley Amis reviewed Honey for the Bears , by Anthony Burgess
Martin Amis reviewed The Andy Warhol Diaries
Judd Apatow reviewed Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces , by Michael Chabon
Brooke Astor reviewed Treasures of the New York Public Library , by Marshall B. Davidson with Bernard McTigue
Saul Bellow reviewed A Treasury of Great Russian Short Storie s , edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Erma Bombeck reviewed Free to BeYou and Me , edited by Marlo Thomas
Ray Bradbury reviewed The Home Planet , edited by Kevin W. Kelley
Gwendolyn Brooks reviewed The Life of Langston Hughes
William F. Buckley Jr. reviewed The Right People , by Stephen Birmingham
James M. Cain reviewed Our Man in Havana , by Graham Greene
J. M. Coetzee reviewed The Temple of My Familiar , by Alice Walker
Misty Copeland reviewed And Then We Danced:A Voyage Into the Groove , by Henry Alford
Michael Crichton reviewed How Doctors Think , by Jerome Groopman
Simone de Beauvoir wrote an essay, An American Renaissance in France
Junot Daz reviewed Deacon King Kong , by James McBride
E. L. Doctorow reviewed The Unbearable Lightness of Being , by Milan Kundera
Arthur Conan Doyle reviewed Communications with the Next World , edited by Estelle W. Stead
Lena Dunham reviewed The Female Persuasion , by Meg Wolitzer
Jennifer Egan reviewed Eat, Pray, Love , by Elizabeth Gilbert
Dave Eggers reviewed All Aunt Hagars Children , by Edward P. Jones
E. M. Forster reviewed The World Is a Bridge , by Christine Weston
Mavis Gallant reviewed From the Diary of a Snail , by Gnter Grass
John Galsworthy reviewed Friday Night , by Edward Garnett
Bill Gates reviewed 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , by Yuval Noah Harari
Atul Gawande reviewed A Fly for the Prosecution , by M. Lee Goff
Roxane Gay reviewed Dept. of Speculation , by Jenny Offill
Nikki Giovanni reviewed M.C. Higgins, the Great , by Virginia Hamilton
Nadine Gordimer reviewed The Flame Trees of Thika , by Elspeth Huxley
Al Gore reviewed The Sixth Extinction , by Elizabeth Kolbert
John Green reviewed The Hunger Games , by Suzanne Collins
Jeremy O. Harris reviewed Real Life ,by Brandon Taylor
Ethan Hawke reviewed Self Portrait with Russian Piano , by Wolf Wondratschek
Chris Hayes reviewed The Impeachers , by Brenda Wineapple
Seamus Heaney reviewed The Poems: A New Edition , by W. B. Yeats
Lillian Hellman reviewed The Provincials , by Eli Evans
Carl Hiaasen reviewed Rush , by Kim Wozencraft
Patricia Highsmith reviewed First on the Rope , by R. Frison-Roche
Christopher Hitchens reviewed The Secret Man , by Bob Woodward
John Irving reviewed The Duke of Deception , by Geoffrey Wolff
Shirley Jackson reviewed Out of the Red , by Red Smith
N. K. Jemisin reviewed The Water Cure , by Sophie Mackintosh
Tayari Jones reviewed Men We Reaped , by Jesmyn Ward
Michael Kinsley reviewed Going Clear ,by Lawrence Wright
Henry Kissinger reviewed George F. Kennan: An American Life , by John Lewis Gaddis
Karl Ove Knausgaard reviewed Submission , by Michel Houellebecq
John le Carr reviewed The Secret War , by William Stevenson
Ursula Le Guin reviewed War Fever , by J. G. Ballard
Madeleine LEngle reviewed The Sunflower Forest , by Torey Hayden
Elmore Leonard reviewed Lines and Shadows , by Joseph Wambaugh
Doris Lessing reviewed The Inner World of Mental Illness , edited by Bert Kaplan
Sinclair Lewis reviewed The Narrow House , by Evelyn Scott
Rob Lowe reviewed Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies , by Dave Itzkoff
Rachel Maddow reviewed Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country , by Andrew J. Bacevich
Thomas Mann reviewed Rehearsal for Destruction , by Paul W. Massing
Hilary Mantel reviewed Down by the River , by Edna OBrien
James McBride reviewed The Cairo Affair , by Olen Steinhauer