A Review That Wasn't

Lise Menn Lise.Menn at Colorado.EDU
Tue Oct 23 02:03:36 UTC 2007


Folks, LANGUAGE and other journals depend on volunteer labor for reviews. They have no way to extract them from people who request the book for review and then don't do it, you know. Each book review editor (and lots of other people who depend on volunteers, like NSF program officers) keeps notes, mental or otherwise, on who says they'll help and then doesn't deliver, but they never know with a new volunteer, and sometimes even reliables get overwhelmed by events and a review gets lost.  The book review editor nags a bit now and then, and sometimes reviews come along 3 or 4 years late (look at a book review section and see what the dates of the books being reviewed are compared with the date of the issue that has the review).  Or not...
   And publishers do a lousy job of keeping up with who the editors of journals are.  Jeez, I still get the occasional book addressed to my late husband Bill Bright as editor of Language In Society, which he stopped editing about 10 years ago.  So it can also be your publisher's fault.  Sorry, I know, it's awful to have the feeling that you are shouting into a well.  If we had the tradition of announcing who has been given the job of reviewing a book before the review appears, maybe peer pressure would get them to disgorge the  review - but then, maybe not - and there would be dangers in that way of doing things too.
   Anyway, chalk it up to experience, and keep on truckin', or dancing, choose your metaphor.  I happen to be overdue on a review myself, by a couple of months now...but to the editor who is waiting for it, yes, I will get it done. 
    Lise Menn



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