What do you think?
Rate this book
Dockers and Detectives
A pioneering study of working-class reading and writing. Its first publication helped revive a number of literary reputations, such as those of Alexander Baron and James Hanley, as well as distinguishing distinct regional literary cultures and narrative styles still existing in Britain. Dockers and Detectives drew attention to a group of Liverpool writers who produced a series of expressionist novels about tenement life and the hardships of life at sea, while also containing an essay on the vibrant literature of London's Jewish East End. It provided an assessment of the popularity of American 'tough-guy' crime writing in Britain in the 1930s, and was also the first to take seriously the popular literature of the Second World War - on the home front, on the battlefield, and in the prisoner-of-war camp - with all the moral and political questions raised by that writing.
- GenresNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
15 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 17, 2023
Dockers and Detectives., by Ken Worpole, 1983
Worpole was aiming to look at working class reading and writing “that conventional literary criticism have ignored.” p.9
Working class books are often either “allowed to disappear through neglect (or) killed at the roots by recurring frosts of socialist economism.” p.10
By economism I think he means the socialist mainstreams focus on economic demands and economic exploitation rather than cultural class oppression. This also suggests that there have been few consistent working class guardians of a w/c literary works as a whole. On top of that process of attrition of what did get published he points out:
“The basis of any kind of literature is economic. Only a fraction of the books written are published, and only a fraction of those published are promoted and distributed in popular and interventionist ways.” p.10
We will assume that a large part of those unpublished m/s are by working class writers.
The FEDeration of worker writers (groups) and community publishers’ in the Seventies and Eighties proved that a non-commercial model of the production of literature could work on a community level with a more direct relationship with a local readership. Commercial pressure results in a literature that needs to appeal to as wide an audience and as large a market as possible. And yet it relies on innovation by the corners of publishing and smaller groups of readers that are more idiosyncratic. When writers have freedom to write about what they feel about the world they experience, the product is more likely to fulfil Raymond Williams’ definition of the purpose of culture.
"The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life. Its basic element is its effort at total qualitative assessment... What it indicates is a process not a conclusion." Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, 1958 p.285
There is also the attrition of the volume of reading produced 99% of which is forgotten within 20 years! In what a sense? Mainly that it is not reviewed? Also I would add, not taken up by a specialist group of enthusiast readers, or found its way into permanent library collections.
The Left has tended to criticise popular consumption rather than encourage, aid and celebrate unfettered working class creativity. This was a trend we can trace back to the reverence for the great canon of English literature.
Fictional Politics: traditions and trajectories. - Chapter 1
Worpole argues that the novel in England has its origins in writings based on stories from the criminal culture of London’s underworld. (referring to Lennard J. Davis, 1983). This was something that gave early fiction a morally dubious reputation amongst the arbiters of taste. This was at a time when ‘fictionality’ was hardly formally recognised as a separate category of writing. Until the Stamp Act of 1712 -16 there was a single literary discourse that did not have clear distinctions between the factual or fictional. The Stamp Tax imposed its charge on ‘news’ and left other forms of writing untaxed.
Middle and upper class women were a large proportion of readers in the C18th, because they had more flexible leisure. They also wrote popular early romances before Defoe, and were part of the formative period of the novel. (Intriguing but not followed up by Worpole) These women were led by Aphra Benn, a contemporary of Bunyan?, and included such as Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre and Catherine Trotter
Wikipedia now lists 21 working class women writers in this intriguing C18th list…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
In the century before that “The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan and Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, both published in the 1680s. Bunyan introduced into English literature ideas of individualism and the quest of personal fulfillment. Behn used her writing as social criticism to question the Atlantic slave trade.” quoted from Wikipedia
The publisher Richard Carlyle 1790 - 1843), son of a shoemaker and famous for publishing Tom Paine’s work and going to prison for being a radical atheist, said: “He who burns a romance purifies the human mind.” The radical and evangelical distrust of the novel was a strong influence on readers throughout the C19th. A canon of acceptable literature developed that had a moral tone.
Worpole doesn’t consider Habermas point that a novel form of literature developed to represent bourgeois interiority following Richardson’s 1740s hit with ‘Pamela’. (But is Habermas point out of date now people have discovered the earlier female writers? Were they writing about contemporary subjectivities?)
“The enormous effort - articulated most explicitly by Matthew Arnold – to make English literature a substitute for religion, the moral currency of the culture, may have given the novel a greater sense of its own importance, but this has often been achieved at the expense of storytelling, vernacular, democratic obligations.” p. 42
This kind of respectable literature was revered by the socialist movement that evolved at the end of the C19th. (Worpole does not refer to the ’Self-improvement reading circles’ that weren’t known about when he wrote this book.)
“The rigid demarcation line that separates ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ writing is a product of a class culture – and its many institutions – which resist all attempts to widen cultural democracy." p. 20
The canon of Great British Literature stigmatises other forms of writing.
He claims that working class readers are the largest reading public. I think this still likely to be true although they do not have, or it hasn’t been uncovered, a way of critically evaluating that reading.
Another interesting point that is not unpacked…
“The more deeply you explore the many different forms of working-class writing in this century, the more problematic the concept of ‘the working-class novel’ or ‘working-class literature’ becomes.” p.23
There are so many forms from autobiographies to prison literature, experimental novels, short stories, poetry, and factual texts. The themes tended not to be about workplace struggles, as the stereotype suggests, but are rather about themes like unwanted pregnancies and homelessness.
This is why I think it better to look at ‘working class books’ rather than only literature.
"Working-class writing, in all its forms, provides an invaluable range of understanding of the dominant forms of oppression and division, and is therefore an integral and central part of an active and participatory working-class politics.” p. 23
I like this quote because it suggests writing is “integral and central” to politics and i’d like to see it analysed in more detail.
Working class books faced a moralistic judgmentalism that prefers the elite to the grassroots. He then discusses the innovations of popular American fiction in the 20th century that managed to escape this elite management. This is the subject of the next chapter.
The American connection and the masculine style - Chapter 2..
American authors were able to take on vernacular style of writing and speech and so appeal to more working class readers. I remember that reading Raymond Chandler was like breath of fresh air. He quotes Chandler (1888 - 1959) saying; “the English writer is a gentleman first and a writer second.”
The English writer assumes that the tonal variations of posh speech will be added to the dialogue by the (posh) reader. Not so for a working class reader (speaking for myself!) who reads it as stilted. It was with the American detective novel that adopted the flatter common transatlantic tones. After WW1 the detective novel had become the most popular fictional genre in US and Europe.
Worpole refers back to William Godwin (1756 - 1836). His book ‘Things as they are: the adventures of Caleb Williams’ (1794) probably influenced the first w/c political organisation the London Corresponding Society. In this book Godwin points out that in practice the law runs in favour of the rich rather than being a protection for the oppressed.
But in the Victorian era working class characters were mostly conspicuous by their absence.
“In the 1920s in the 1930s the crime novel dealt with many of the same fears as the earlier novels, but less exotically. The detective novel in this period was a form of fictional reassurance for middle-class readership that the continuity of the class system is safe.” p. 33
We are talking Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘’Sherlock Holmes’ (1887 - 1927) and then Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976) here (although Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were famous female writers of detective fiction of this time)
Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway were developing their stripped down style of writing in the later 1920s but it was only after the Second WW that American writing became established on the UK market. It seemed to better reflected the feel of modern city life.
Raymond Chandler’s first novel ‘The Big Sleep’ was published in 1939. The Micky Spillane (1918 - 2006) novels came out son after the war. These contrasted with the English novels as eulogised by Matthew Arnold in which the novel had “become a rhetorical form, in which detailed description of place, custom and dress, together with an appropriate amount of moral reflection, tend to weigh down the progress of the narrative to a debilitating degree.” p. 42
As a young reader I always found these flowery descriptive passages completely off-putting.
Having been set in motion the genre of the modern detective novel has had stamina…
Frank Norman’s, ‘Bang to Rights’ (1958), the archetypal prison novel, was admired by Chandler and William Mcilvaney (1936 - 2015) took the baton with his ‘Laidlaw’, 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...
“Economic and cultural oppression have historically reduced and limited narrative styles by which that oppression can be resisted and overthrown.” p. 48
The Popular Literature of the WW2 - Chapter 3.
This makes many important points about what is left out the canon. But it’s not all about working class writing so I’ll just mention, in passing, the final part on ‘dissenting writers’ the first two of which are working class.
Alexander Baron ‘From the City , From the Plough’ 1948.
Dan Billany, ‘The Trap’ 1949.
Stuart Hood, ‘Pebble from my Skull’, 1963.
Expressionism and working-class fiction - Chapter 4.
Thirties male authors - this expands on what Christopher Hilliard has written… His discussion is guided by the distinction made by Walter Benjamin on the ‘two types’ of people’s stories. On the one hand the traditional tales passed down generations by settled people and on the other, the stories of travellers which are more heterogeneous. So there is either the stories of settled working class daily life as told by such people as the miner writer like BL Coombes and it is often assumed that these are about work life (but as said before the most consistent theme is about unwanted pregnancies and the subsequent abortions.)
Then there are: The ‘travellers stories’ and this genre is represented by a trio of seamen - James Hanley, (1897 - 1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H...
Jim Phelan (1895 - 1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Phe...
and George Garrett. (1896 - 1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...
These men write in a way that Worpole sees as expressionistic, with high drama and more extreme violence. These books seem freer and more experimental in form, and not following any expectations of what a working class writer should writing about. The feeling is that they have broken free from the influence of Lehman and his Etonian gang that acted s agents for male proletarian writers of the Thirties.
The question of what people expect the content of a working class book should contain is broached by this discussion.
Out of the Ghetto - the literature of London’s Jewish East End - Chapter 5..
The Whitechapel Reference Library features in this final chapter, which contradicts the usual assumption we might make that state provision comes with regulation! Through the Thirties an autonomous working class Jewish culture still existed around the East End. A selection of authors are discussed with their first novels:
Simon Blumenfeld’s ‘Jew Boy’ 1935. Worpole is critical of his subsequent work such as ‘They Won’t Let You Live’ as ‘losing direction’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_B...
Willie Goldman ‘East End My Cradle’, 1940
Ashley Smith ‘Children with Fire’, 1934 - short stories and ‘The Brimming Lake’, 1937. Smith writes with a different, more modernist, aesthetic?
Worpole suggests that most writers from this scene tended to drift from the East End towards Soho after WW2. A account that is ficitonalised by Roland Camberton in his ‘Scamp’, 1950. (Published by John Lehmann) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
From the East End to Soho; and Wolff Mankowitz, the account disperses after WW2 ends, as do the writers.
My Conclusion..
This ground breaking book book stimulated Howard Slater to write his exhaustive list of Thirties w/c writers. It also provided literary background to Worpole’s involvement with the Federation of Worker Writers.
This book is packed full of interesting ideas and critical thinking. Some of it is frustratingly not followed through in a systematic way - like tracking the crime novel from its earliest days to the post war detective novels with examples. But the book probably expanded in scope as he wrote it. Wee worth getting hold of if you can!
Worpole was aiming to look at working class reading and writing “that conventional literary criticism have ignored.” p.9
Working class books are often either “allowed to disappear through neglect (or) killed at the roots by recurring frosts of socialist economism.” p.10
By economism I think he means the socialist mainstreams focus on economic demands and economic exploitation rather than cultural class oppression. This also suggests that there have been few consistent working class guardians of a w/c literary works as a whole. On top of that process of attrition of what did get published he points out:
“The basis of any kind of literature is economic. Only a fraction of the books written are published, and only a fraction of those published are promoted and distributed in popular and interventionist ways.” p.10
We will assume that a large part of those unpublished m/s are by working class writers.
The FEDeration of worker writers (groups) and community publishers’ in the Seventies and Eighties proved that a non-commercial model of the production of literature could work on a community level with a more direct relationship with a local readership. Commercial pressure results in a literature that needs to appeal to as wide an audience and as large a market as possible. And yet it relies on innovation by the corners of publishing and smaller groups of readers that are more idiosyncratic. When writers have freedom to write about what they feel about the world they experience, the product is more likely to fulfil Raymond Williams’ definition of the purpose of culture.
"The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life. Its basic element is its effort at total qualitative assessment... What it indicates is a process not a conclusion." Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, 1958 p.285
There is also the attrition of the volume of reading produced 99% of which is forgotten within 20 years! In what a sense? Mainly that it is not reviewed? Also I would add, not taken up by a specialist group of enthusiast readers, or found its way into permanent library collections.
The Left has tended to criticise popular consumption rather than encourage, aid and celebrate unfettered working class creativity. This was a trend we can trace back to the reverence for the great canon of English literature.
Fictional Politics: traditions and trajectories. - Chapter 1
Worpole argues that the novel in England has its origins in writings based on stories from the criminal culture of London’s underworld. (referring to Lennard J. Davis, 1983). This was something that gave early fiction a morally dubious reputation amongst the arbiters of taste. This was at a time when ‘fictionality’ was hardly formally recognised as a separate category of writing. Until the Stamp Act of 1712 -16 there was a single literary discourse that did not have clear distinctions between the factual or fictional. The Stamp Tax imposed its charge on ‘news’ and left other forms of writing untaxed.
Middle and upper class women were a large proportion of readers in the C18th, because they had more flexible leisure. They also wrote popular early romances before Defoe, and were part of the formative period of the novel. (Intriguing but not followed up by Worpole) These women were led by Aphra Benn, a contemporary of Bunyan?, and included such as Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Susanna Centlivre and Catherine Trotter
Wikipedia now lists 21 working class women writers in this intriguing C18th list…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
In the century before that “The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan and Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, both published in the 1680s. Bunyan introduced into English literature ideas of individualism and the quest of personal fulfillment. Behn used her writing as social criticism to question the Atlantic slave trade.” quoted from Wikipedia
The publisher Richard Carlyle 1790 - 1843), son of a shoemaker and famous for publishing Tom Paine’s work and going to prison for being a radical atheist, said: “He who burns a romance purifies the human mind.” The radical and evangelical distrust of the novel was a strong influence on readers throughout the C19th. A canon of acceptable literature developed that had a moral tone.
Worpole doesn’t consider Habermas point that a novel form of literature developed to represent bourgeois interiority following Richardson’s 1740s hit with ‘Pamela’. (But is Habermas point out of date now people have discovered the earlier female writers? Were they writing about contemporary subjectivities?)
“The enormous effort - articulated most explicitly by Matthew Arnold – to make English literature a substitute for religion, the moral currency of the culture, may have given the novel a greater sense of its own importance, but this has often been achieved at the expense of storytelling, vernacular, democratic obligations.” p. 42
This kind of respectable literature was revered by the socialist movement that evolved at the end of the C19th. (Worpole does not refer to the ’Self-improvement reading circles’ that weren’t known about when he wrote this book.)
“The rigid demarcation line that separates ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ writing is a product of a class culture – and its many institutions – which resist all attempts to widen cultural democracy." p. 20
The canon of Great British Literature stigmatises other forms of writing.
He claims that working class readers are the largest reading public. I think this still likely to be true although they do not have, or it hasn’t been uncovered, a way of critically evaluating that reading.
Another interesting point that is not unpacked…
“The more deeply you explore the many different forms of working-class writing in this century, the more problematic the concept of ‘the working-class novel’ or ‘working-class literature’ becomes.” p.23
There are so many forms from autobiographies to prison literature, experimental novels, short stories, poetry, and factual texts. The themes tended not to be about workplace struggles, as the stereotype suggests, but are rather about themes like unwanted pregnancies and homelessness.
This is why I think it better to look at ‘working class books’ rather than only literature.
"Working-class writing, in all its forms, provides an invaluable range of understanding of the dominant forms of oppression and division, and is therefore an integral and central part of an active and participatory working-class politics.” p. 23
I like this quote because it suggests writing is “integral and central” to politics and i’d like to see it analysed in more detail.
Working class books faced a moralistic judgmentalism that prefers the elite to the grassroots. He then discusses the innovations of popular American fiction in the 20th century that managed to escape this elite management. This is the subject of the next chapter.
The American connection and the masculine style - Chapter 2..
American authors were able to take on vernacular style of writing and speech and so appeal to more working class readers. I remember that reading Raymond Chandler was like breath of fresh air. He quotes Chandler (1888 - 1959) saying; “the English writer is a gentleman first and a writer second.”
The English writer assumes that the tonal variations of posh speech will be added to the dialogue by the (posh) reader. Not so for a working class reader (speaking for myself!) who reads it as stilted. It was with the American detective novel that adopted the flatter common transatlantic tones. After WW1 the detective novel had become the most popular fictional genre in US and Europe.
Worpole refers back to William Godwin (1756 - 1836). His book ‘Things as they are: the adventures of Caleb Williams’ (1794) probably influenced the first w/c political organisation the London Corresponding Society. In this book Godwin points out that in practice the law runs in favour of the rich rather than being a protection for the oppressed.
But in the Victorian era working class characters were mostly conspicuous by their absence.
“In the 1920s in the 1930s the crime novel dealt with many of the same fears as the earlier novels, but less exotically. The detective novel in this period was a form of fictional reassurance for middle-class readership that the continuity of the class system is safe.” p. 33
We are talking Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘’Sherlock Holmes’ (1887 - 1927) and then Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976) here (although Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were famous female writers of detective fiction of this time)
Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway were developing their stripped down style of writing in the later 1920s but it was only after the Second WW that American writing became established on the UK market. It seemed to better reflected the feel of modern city life.
Raymond Chandler’s first novel ‘The Big Sleep’ was published in 1939. The Micky Spillane (1918 - 2006) novels came out son after the war. These contrasted with the English novels as eulogised by Matthew Arnold in which the novel had “become a rhetorical form, in which detailed description of place, custom and dress, together with an appropriate amount of moral reflection, tend to weigh down the progress of the narrative to a debilitating degree.” p. 42
As a young reader I always found these flowery descriptive passages completely off-putting.
Having been set in motion the genre of the modern detective novel has had stamina…
Frank Norman’s, ‘Bang to Rights’ (1958), the archetypal prison novel, was admired by Chandler and William Mcilvaney (1936 - 2015) took the baton with his ‘Laidlaw’, 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...
“Economic and cultural oppression have historically reduced and limited narrative styles by which that oppression can be resisted and overthrown.” p. 48
The Popular Literature of the WW2 - Chapter 3.
This makes many important points about what is left out the canon. But it’s not all about working class writing so I’ll just mention, in passing, the final part on ‘dissenting writers’ the first two of which are working class.
Alexander Baron ‘From the City , From the Plough’ 1948.
Dan Billany, ‘The Trap’ 1949.
Stuart Hood, ‘Pebble from my Skull’, 1963.
Expressionism and working-class fiction - Chapter 4.
Thirties male authors - this expands on what Christopher Hilliard has written… His discussion is guided by the distinction made by Walter Benjamin on the ‘two types’ of people’s stories. On the one hand the traditional tales passed down generations by settled people and on the other, the stories of travellers which are more heterogeneous. So there is either the stories of settled working class daily life as told by such people as the miner writer like BL Coombes and it is often assumed that these are about work life (but as said before the most consistent theme is about unwanted pregnancies and the subsequent abortions.)
Then there are: The ‘travellers stories’ and this genre is represented by a trio of seamen - James Hanley, (1897 - 1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H...
Jim Phelan (1895 - 1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Phe...
and George Garrett. (1896 - 1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...
These men write in a way that Worpole sees as expressionistic, with high drama and more extreme violence. These books seem freer and more experimental in form, and not following any expectations of what a working class writer should writing about. The feeling is that they have broken free from the influence of Lehman and his Etonian gang that acted s agents for male proletarian writers of the Thirties.
The question of what people expect the content of a working class book should contain is broached by this discussion.
Out of the Ghetto - the literature of London’s Jewish East End - Chapter 5..
The Whitechapel Reference Library features in this final chapter, which contradicts the usual assumption we might make that state provision comes with regulation! Through the Thirties an autonomous working class Jewish culture still existed around the East End. A selection of authors are discussed with their first novels:
Simon Blumenfeld’s ‘Jew Boy’ 1935. Worpole is critical of his subsequent work such as ‘They Won’t Let You Live’ as ‘losing direction’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_B...
Willie Goldman ‘East End My Cradle’, 1940
Ashley Smith ‘Children with Fire’, 1934 - short stories and ‘The Brimming Lake’, 1937. Smith writes with a different, more modernist, aesthetic?
Worpole suggests that most writers from this scene tended to drift from the East End towards Soho after WW2. A account that is ficitonalised by Roland Camberton in his ‘Scamp’, 1950. (Published by John Lehmann) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_...
From the East End to Soho; and Wolff Mankowitz, the account disperses after WW2 ends, as do the writers.
My Conclusion..
This ground breaking book book stimulated Howard Slater to write his exhaustive list of Thirties w/c writers. It also provided literary background to Worpole’s involvement with the Federation of Worker Writers.
This book is packed full of interesting ideas and critical thinking. Some of it is frustratingly not followed through in a systematic way - like tracking the crime novel from its earliest days to the post war detective novels with examples. But the book probably expanded in scope as he wrote it. Wee worth getting hold of if you can!
July 13, 2025
This long essay/short book posits that there was no culture of British working class writing between The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and the Angry Young Men, and working class readers turned to American detective fiction (Hammett, Chandler) for plots and a terse language that they admired. This hypothesis only works if you ignore Arnold Bennett, Arthur Morrison, J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene, George Orwell (these latter two are from the lower-upper middle class, but wrote convincingly about the workers), Patrick Hamilton, V.S. Pritchett, Gerald Kersh, Sam Selvon, Shelagh Delaney, Edna O'Brien (not British), the two Colins (Spence and Macinnes), and Joe Orton (this was just off the top of my head).
It feels as if Worpole wants a very specific working class writer: urban - a factory worker, not a farm hand, male, white, heterosexual, not educated beyond secondary school, someone who has not elevated himself into the middle class; he must still live in a terraced house, he has married young and has kids. He perhaps has studied writing at a technical college and is writing in a social(ist) realism tradition, not sci-fi (e.g. H.G.Wells) or romance. They must write at the time, not looking back in old age.
However, he also talks about the success of publishing houses like Virago that reprinted forgotten books by female writers and suggests a similar project for working class writers. Thanks to this book and Iain Sinclair, some novels mentioned have been reissued: Journey Through A Small Planet by Emmanuel Litvinoff, The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, and Rain On Pavements by Roland Camberton.
It feels as if Worpole wants a very specific working class writer: urban - a factory worker, not a farm hand, male, white, heterosexual, not educated beyond secondary school, someone who has not elevated himself into the middle class; he must still live in a terraced house, he has married young and has kids. He perhaps has studied writing at a technical college and is writing in a social(ist) realism tradition, not sci-fi (e.g. H.G.Wells) or romance. They must write at the time, not looking back in old age.
However, he also talks about the success of publishing houses like Virago that reprinted forgotten books by female writers and suggests a similar project for working class writers. Thanks to this book and Iain Sinclair, some novels mentioned have been reissued: Journey Through A Small Planet by Emmanuel Litvinoff, The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, and Rain On Pavements by Roland Camberton.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews