On Reviewing

A while back I taught an undergraduate course, at intervals over a ten-year period, in “literary journalism,” which I got to define however I liked. I started off with narrative nonfiction, and then I had a little section on opinion writing, and then I moved on to book reviewing. The last time I taught my course, in the teens, I was startled by something new. The students didn’t know what I was talking about. They couldn’t understand the difference between articles about books in a newspaper or a magazine and “reviews” that appeared on a consumer site like Amazon or blurbs on the back of the book.