You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
… the present book is decidedly obscure, composed in an artificial fashion and badly written.
While all books are written to be read, the fact is that some are and some are not. The authors of the former are the lucky ones. Even more fortunate are authors whose books become the subject of others' writing. At times, such a response is complex and lengthy enough to constitute a book itself. Kurt Eissler's Talent and Genius (1971), written as a rejoinder to Paul Roazen's Brother Animal (1969), a book about the Freud-Tausk relationship, is an example of this sort. Most published books evoke less magisterial reactions. Response to them is restricted to reviews in professional journals. Such reviews vary considerably in their scope, length, literary merit, and sophistication. These variations in the material written about books are our focus here.
With the goal of highlighting the broad range of commentary on psychoanalytic books, and in the hope that familiarity with this range might help potential book reviewers who are staring at their word processors awaiting the inspiration to transform their thoughts into words, we offer our observations. At the risk of sounding obsessionally taxonomic, we distinguish seven categories of material written about books: (i) dust jacket comment, (ii) the book notice or “briefly