On book review essays and geographical criticism

We hope that readers of the Scottish Geographical Journal (SGJ) will have noticed the recent discontinuation of book reviews in their older form, relatively short and mainly descriptive of the book in question, and replacement by what we term Book Review Essays, potentially anywhere between 2000 and 6000 words in length. As we explained in the Editorial from the new Editorial Team that took over responsibility for the SGJ in 2022:

We have decided to discontinue standard book reviews, gradually phasing them out over the next year once extant commissioned reviews have appeared, given that there is such arbitrariness about what we receive from publishers (and increasingly there is no automatic pass-on of review copies) and with respect to which reviewers are able to complete the task. Alternatively, though, longer book review essays, based on single or maybe clusters of books, strike us as an attractive option for making serious contributions to our disciplinary literatures: an example of what we might like to receive would be the reviews offered in an outlet such as the London Review of Books (see https://www.lrb.co.uk). (Philo et al., 2022, p. 9)

As we intimate here, there are both positive and negative reasons shaping this decision, and the remarks that follow will touch upon both sets of reasons.

Our last old-style book review appeared in the first (double-)issue for 2022 (Simpson, 2022), and since then we have published 16 Book Review Essays of varying lengths, including five in the current issue. Five to date concentrate on books with a Scottish focus but with rather different substantive emphases (Carnie, 2024; Elliott, 2023; Gray, 2023; Moore, 2023; Rennie, 2022), one tackles a cluster of edited books concerned with the literary representation of Ireland (Kearns, 2022), one engages critical global-environmental studies (Castree, 2022), and the remainder address themes that sit broadly within the concerns of a widely-defined human geography (Bonnett, 2023; Goonewardena, 2023; Gray, 2023; Hall, 2023; Kruse, 2023; Morris, 2024; Sarmento, 2024; Varley, 2024; Von Benzon, 2024). One essay, Kruse (2023), has elicited a response (Pritchard, 2023) – caveating rather than objecting per se to the review essay – from the author of the original book. An obvious observation is that treatments of books with a more overtly physical or environmental geography focus are as yet absent. We do have several more books currently out to authors who have been invited, and kindly agreed, to provide Book Review Essays over the coming months, and we will say a little more in closing about the process of recruiting such contributions.

An approximate pecursor of our decision is the appearance in 2013 of the AAG Review of Books (AAGRB), gathering together book reviews that used to appear in the two flagship journals run by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) – the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and The Professional Geographer – into their own dedicated online journal (https://www.aag.org/journal/the-aag-review-of-books/). The guidelines for this journal on its website indicate that ‘[w]e are looking for reviews that go beyond summarising the content and structure of the book,’ adding that ‘[r]eviews should critically engage with the content, reflecting on its importance to the discipline more widely and its engagement (or not) with contemporary debates.’ We did not consult the AAGRB website before drafting our own ‘brief’ for SGJ Book Review Essays, but there is an equivalent sense of wishing to go beyond just describing the book towards a more expansive appraisal of its contribution to, and indeed beyond, the disciplinary horizons of academic geography. The AAGRB distinguishes between ‘Book Reviews’ of a single book (1500-2000 words), a ‘Review Essay’ on two or more books (2500-5000 words), and a ‘Book Forum’ where several different reviewers are invited to consider the same book. In effect, we have combined the first two categories together, while also – as a separate initiative – innovating the possibility of the SGJ carrying book forums through the example from our last issue of six short pieces all reflecting upon the 50^th anniversary of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (Attoh, 2023; Doherty, 2023; Korfiati & Kallin, 2023; Mitchell, 2023a, 2023b; Sanders, 2023).

As indicated, there are various reasons behind our decision to replace book reviews with Book Review Essays, and one set of ‘negative’ reasons indeed lies with the relative arbitariness of what the journal is sent by publishers for potential review, to which we might add that few publishers now offer books for review. By ‘arbitrary’ here, what we mean is that we are transparently not receiving what might be judged a comprehensive or representative sample of the long-form literature being produced in and around academic geography. There is likely also an issue of capacity here, contrasting with what was evidently true in the past. In the first issue from 1885 of the SGJ (then the Scottish Geographical Magazine [SGM]) it was stated that the ambition is ‘to supply henceforward a complete record of works bearing on Geographical subjects’ (Anon., 1885a, p. 64), prefacing a sequence of reports, spread across the first volume in 1885, on the ‘Geographical literature in 1864’, providing both short notes and longer commentaries on over a hundred books distinguished by their world region of address (Africa, Asia, Americas, etc.). The evident intention was that each year the SGM would carry a genuinely comprehensive review of books, principally but not entirely in English, published during the preceding year. The first issue also included a section entitled ‘New Books’, with nearly ten pages of small close-lined typeface reviewing 13 books, mostly travel-writing of some kind but also works of an emerging academic geography. The intention in this latter respect was that each issue of the SGM would furnish in-depth reviews of recently published books, with a footnote suggesting that most if not all books here were ones ‘publishers sent for review’ (Anon., 1885b, Footnote, p.69). It is obvious that an enormous amount of labour was going into surveying, reading, writing about and perhaps also soliciting from the available geographical literature, presumably on the part of the journal editor but undoubtedly with sizeable support from unnamed others (no names are attached to the texts). The capacity – the time, energy and resources – to mount anything like a comparable exercise today is simply non-existent.

If we jump to the first issue of the 1924 volume, a century ago, there is still tangible adherence to the founding vision. There is no separate review of literature from the previous year, but a section called ‘New Books’ (Anon., 1924a) reviews 28 books, some reviewed as brief notes but many as substantial descriptions, mostly travelogues – clustered under headings such as ‘Australasia’, ‘Oceania’ and so on – but with a few academic texts badged as ‘Educational’. A separate statement is also provided of ‘Books Received’ (Anon., 1924b) for review, listing 43 titles. Leaping forward again to the first issue of the 1964 volume, something of the founding vision still remains in a section called ‘Reviews of Books’ (Freeman et al., 1964), with 16 books reviewed, most of which now have an obvious academic character, even if clustered under world region headings, and including several texts badged as ‘Cartography’ that reflect the sense of a ‘technical’ geographical methodology now arising around not just mapping but also ‘air survey’ and statistical procedures. Each review is now individually attributed to an author, most being professional geographers, a practice that then continues.

By the first issue of 2004, the feel is rather different, with a section called ‘Book Reviews’ (Smith et al., 2004) populated by five medium-length reviews of clearly academic works, three designated as ‘Focus on Scotland’ and two as ‘New works in geography’. The first issue of 2014 carries a section called ‘Book Reviews’ comprising three reviews, each now published individually not collectively on the SGJ website; the equivalent section for the entire 2020 volume – Issues 1-4 for 2020 being combined into one bumper edition – offers five reviews; while the 2021 volume – again combining Issues 1-4 – offers just two reviews. In 2022 our new policy on book reviews came into play. What this outline history of book reviewing in the SGM/SGJ plainly reveals is an extremely marked tail-off in recent years from the scale and scope of what was happening in the 1880s through until even the 1960s. What this tail-off signals – with nobody as such to blame – is a dramatic retreat from seeking to be comprehensive to a situation where, manifestly, neither the capacity nor the conditions now obtain for being anything other than non-comprehensive, and thus highly selective and arbitrary, regarding which books get reviewed. Hard-pressed journal editors – coping with the ever-spiralling research, teaching and administration demands of higher education and without the ‘luxury’ of being able to devote extensive portions of time to editing a journal, unlike what was arguably the case for someone like long-term SGM editor Marion Newbigin (see Philo et al., 2022) – simply cannot even begin to approximate the level of review-related coordination and activity that was once a hallmark of a journal like the SGM/SGJ. In consequence, such a negative situation, which we know is mirrored in many other academic journals, does demand a creative response.

More ‘positively’, though, there are reasons to appreciate certain benefits that can arise if we move to an alternative model of book reviewing that worries less about ‘quantity’ – numerical and representative coverage – and more about the ‘quality’ of the reviewing that can be undertaken and, plausibly, improved by moving to a longer-form book review. A good few years ago Michael Dear – the celebrated Welsh but now long-time California-based geographer of urbanism, borders, state apparatuses, welfare restructuring, and socio-spatial analysis – pondered what he terms ‘the culture of criticism’ (Dear, 1988, esp. p.374). In effect, he asks whether our discipline possesses anything like a tradition equivalent to that of literary criticism, the latter entailing the sustained, deeply evaluative ‘reading’ of creative literature in the tradition of someone like T.S. Eliott (Dear, 1989, p. 226). Inspired by difficult critical work conducted to identify the latent Nazism in the writings of German intellectuals Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, Dear is led to contemplate what he laments as the limited critical skills of the geographer as contrasted with ‘[p]ick[ing] up any copy of The Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books, and examin[ing] the depth of criticism offered there’ (p.225).

Developing his thoughts with specific reference to book reviewing, Dear authors a short editorial prefacing a book review section of The Canadian Geographer, in which he remarks that ‘[g]eographers … are terrible critics,’ before proceeding ‘to ask why we are such poor book reviewers, and to suggest how we could do better’ (Dear, 1990, p. 186). Having previously denounced our ‘pages of mindless book reviews (usually little more than utilitarian content-summaries)’ (Dear, 1989, p. 225), he now reflects:

Why is the overall standard of our book reviewing so low? We may, of course, simply be too lazy to take the time to write thoughtful reviews. After all, it is easy to take the free book and submit yet another mindless contents summary to the review editor. Some of us may be reluctant to speak plainly; others may cynically observe that reviews count for naught at promotion and tenure time. I suspect there is also a trace of academic philistinism – too few geographers are in the habit of writing books that others feel obliged to read or buy. And sometimes editors do not help matters when they insist on stringent word limits for a review. (Dear, 1990, p. 186)

These claims doubtless held some merit as the 1980s turned into the 1990, and arguably they do so today, possibly even more so, particularly when there is so little professional incentive to write book reviews – they seemingly do ‘count for naught’ for career advancement, while the likes of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise accords virtually no heed to book reviewing – and when academic journals do ‘insist on stringent word limits’. Dear makes a persuasive counter-case for why what might be called ‘geographical criticism’ is and should remain significant for geographers, wrapping this case together with recommendations for what constitutes ‘Good Criticism’ that we feel worthwhile copying here (see Figure 1). The date of these recommendations, 1990, and its evident leaning towards human geography must both be kept in mind.

Figure 1. Michael Dear’s prescriptions for ‘Good Criticism’. (Source: Dear, 1990, p. 187).

We are persuaded by Dear’s more positive verdicts on what a different form of book reviewing might bring to academic geography, even as we might dispute – including from the evidence of what has appeared in past issues of the SGM/SGJ – the absolutism in his denunciation of older efforts at book reviewing within the geographical literature. As a result, going forward, we do indeed wish to encourage a different – more engaged, creative, lateral-thinking – sensibility for book reviewing in the journal. An explicit shift from book reviews to Book Review Essays is intended as a central plank of that encouragement, as too is the removal of ‘stringent word limits’ and the supplementary decision that these essays should have their own titles – rather than simply being ‘Review of Book A’ – so that they can legitimately appear on author CVs as proper ‘articles’ rather than just reviews. Questions remain about what books might be subjected to this expanded geographical criticism and who might be our Book Review Essay authors, and at present it must be confessed that both books selected and authors invited have been almost entirely down to subjective judgements made by the current Editor-in-Chief. A few books have been offered by publishers – for which many thanks to Routledge, Edinburgh University Press, and Whittles Publishing – but we would be delighted to receive more offers or suggestions from publishers, authors or other interested parties. Similarly, we would welcome proposals from authors – authors inside or outside the academy; authors from and/or interested in Scotland, the UK and elsewhere; authors wanting to be imaginative in how they engage with a book (eg. Von Benzon, 2024) – with ideas about books that they might like to discuss at length. We do wish to ensure that the revitalised geographical criticism that we envisage for the SGJ and our Book Review Essays is indeed as diverse and inclusive – in what is covered, how and by who – as possible.