The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History

by The New York Times, Tina Jordan (Editor), Noor Qasim (Editor)

A "delightful" (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.

Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the publication where authors have been made, and where readers first encountered the classics that have enriched their lives.

Now the editors have curated the Book Review's dynamic 125-year history, which is essentially the story of modern American letters. Brimming with remarkable reportage and photography, this beautiful book collects interesting reviews, never-before-heard anecdotes about famous writers, and spicy letter exchanges. Here are the first takes on novels we now consider masterpieces, including a long-forgotten pan of Anne of Green Gables and a rave of Mrs. Dalloway, along with reviews and essays by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, and more.

With scores of stunning vintage photographs, many of them sourced from the Times's own archive, readers will discover how literary tastes have shifted through the years--and how the Book Review's coverage has shaped so much of what we read today.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, Literature, Writing, Anthologies

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 2, 2021

About the author

The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. Founded in 1851, the newspaper has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. Its website receives 30 million unique visitors per month.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Life is worth living because there are books, and so let us open a tome with a happy thought, even if it were written by Schopenhauer.” ~Editor’s Note, NYT Book Review 1897

Editors Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim have crafted a 368 page, 600 lb. behemoth of reviews, interviews, editorials, letters, biographies, photos, and illustrations. This is a bibliophile’s biblio-file; a select anthology of the best (and a few of the worst) book reviews of the New York Times, 1896 to 2021.

Chapter One, 1896 - 1921

Most of the very early reviews are from anonymous sources (bylines don’t seem to be prevalent until around 1924). This was both a blessing and a curse: A blessing because reviewers could speak out against social injustices without fear of reprisals; a curse because reviewers could occasionally be remorseless and cruel with little or no backlash (of course, now that I think about it, this is exactly what often happens on Goodreads).

“Of course there are in every community, and in an American community in larger numbers than in any other except a British, plenty of people endowed with a heaven-born itch for minding other people’s business. The less they know about the business the more eager they are to mind it…” ~Editor’s Note on Censorship, NYT 1902

Featured authors of this period include George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Chapter Two, 1921 - 1946

“…even if the Germans were to get away with a lenient peace this coagulated stench will stick to them for the rest of their national history-a fate truly worse than death.” ~William S. Schlamm on Mein Kampf, NYT Book Review, 1943

Featured authors include Agatha Christie, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Countee Cullen, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, Ann Petry, and Christopher Isherwood.

Chapter Three, 1946 - 1971

“In America the career almost invariably becomes an obsession. The “get-ahead” principle, carried to such extreme, inspires our writers to enormous efforts. A new book must come out every year. Otherwise they get panicky, and the first thing you know they belong to Alcoholics Anonymous or have embraced religion…” ~Tennessee Williams on The Sheltering Sky, NYT Book Review, 1949

Featured authors include John Hersey, J.D. Salinger, William F. Buckley Jr., Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Frank, E.B. White, Ryunosuke Akitagawa, Simone de Beauvoir, Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Eugene O’Neill, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Rachel Carson, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Frantz Fanon, Jean Toomer, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Robert Hayden, and Jacqueline Susann.

Chapter Four, 1971 - 1996

“I would think to myself… that the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” ~Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, NYT Book Review, 1990

Featured authors include John Updike, Nikki Giovanni, Stephen King, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Vincent Bugliosi, Shere Hite, John Cheever, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Art Spiegelman, Toni Morrison, Randy Shilts, Gabriel García Márquez, Sandra Cisneros, and Jackie Collins.

Chapter Five, 1996 - 2021

“No marriage is as arbitrary and accidental as one between a writer and a reader, set up by a brief infatuation in a bookstore or the enthusiasm of a third party.” ~Caleb Crain on Interpreter of Maladies, NYT Book Review, 1999

Featured authors include Jhumpa Lahiri, J.K. Rowling, Zadie Smith, Alice Sebold, Miguel de Cervantes, Alison Bechdel, André Aciman, Haruki Murakami, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Robert A. Caro, Celeste Ng, Jacqueline Woodson, Walter Mosley, Lucia Berlin, Colson Whitehead, Tommy Orange, David Sedaris, and Jericho Brown

_______________________________

Smash-Mouth Criticism

Critic John Leonard points out that the reason we see so many “slash-and-burn” critiques is because they are easy to write. For those of us who rate and review, he offers these six rules of engagement:

1. As in Hippocrates, do no harm.
2. Never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle.
3. Always understand that in this symbiosis, you are a parasite.
4. Look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book.
5. Use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill.
6. Let a hundred Harolds Bloom.

Sage advice.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a coffee table book. It has big pages. It is printed on heavy stock paper and it is heavy. It has full page pictures spread our over two pages. It has serious graphic design. It is an attractive book.

It is more of an anthology than a history. The book is arranged chronologically. Each of the five chapters cover 25 years. ( The juvenile part of me, which is pretty big, did get a kick out of a typo in the table of contents of this obviously very carefully prepared book. We get a listing for
"Chapter Two 1921-1694")

Each chapter has excerpts from reviews and articles during that period. We get the contemporaneous interviews of classics like "The Great Gadsby" and "Catch 22". We get celebrity reviewers. Bill Clinton reviews one of the volumes of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography. Kurt Vonnegut writes a glowing review of Tom Wolfe's first book.

Each section also has articles from that period and author interviews as well as sidebars on things like letters to the editors and excerpts of reviews of books on subjects like the Vietnam War or self help.

This is a book for browsing. I particularly enjoyed Dick Schaap's glowing review of "The Godfather" and Nora Ephron's brutal attack on a Jacqueline Susann novel.

I was disappointed that that there was no mention of Anthony Boucher who reviewed crime novels in his "Criminal At Large" column from 1951 to 1968 or of his successor Marilyn Stasio who did the same job for 22 years.

I was also surprised that a big fancy $50 book like this could not afford an index. Particularly since this kind of browsing book is exactly the type that need an index.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really well-curated collection of reviews, essays, letters to the editor, ads, photos, and more from 125 years of the New York Times Book Review. Some of my favorite stuff:
- a letter from an angry reader who is tired of the Book Review’s worship of Rudyard Kipling (and the two responses to the letter) (page 40)
- an interview that reveals the origin of Sherlock Holmes (page 52)
- a crazy story about Agatha Christie that I can’t believe I’d never heard before
- predictions from the 50th anniversary (1946) about what the Book Review would be like on it’s 100th anniversary (1996)

The jewel of this collection is a 1943 review by William Schlamm of an English translation of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which includes an explanation of the difficulties in getting a good translation: “Up to now, every self-respecting translator (and they are a proud lot) dependably stumbled into the pitfall: he rendered the Hitler text in such a way that it made sense. The reason, of course, was the translator’s respect not for the strange subject but for his own language. And, indeed, to make Hitler sound in English as he does in German is more than one can expect from a translator who cares to stay in the business. … Here, for the first time, you get Hitler’s prose almost as unreadable in English as it is in German.”

That is just a small taste of Schlamm’s brilliantly witty review so even if you decide not to read this book you should read the review itself, which you can find here if you are a Times subscriber - https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/time...

Reading through some of the later reviews collected here I’m reminded why I don’t like to read fiction book reviews - Beloved and Love in the Time of Cholera are good examples of reviewers giving away the entire plot of the novel in their review. It’s maddening.

Like any good book about books, this will send you down a ton of rabbit holes. I really enjoyed it.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best part of this book is that you read reviews of books that had just come out and were not as yet considered classics — thus, you get a “real time” capture of a work early in its classic life. Examples of this include Faulkner’s Light in August, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Heller’s Catch-22. You also get first reviews of books like The Godfather, Carrie, and Deliverance, and a scattering of essays by various authors interposed. This is a book to peruse and read over a period of time.

[Rama Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

An appraisal of NY Times book reviews

We get a view of book reviews of the earliest years in the history of NY Times and its coverage in shaping the literature. The reviews encourage debate and exchange of ideas. An editor's note from 1897 points out, "Life is worth living because there are books.” The reviews became more opinionated, broader, and deeper since 1925. Some of the reprinted reviews in this book are edited for clarity and to shorten them. One can read errors, insensitivity, race and gender bias, and misunderstood masterpieces of their time. The inaugural issue of the book review started in 1896. In the early days, reviewers never used the term "I" that was discouraged by the newspaper, but the magisterial "we" was encouraged, like for example, what flaws did "we" discover in this promising book.

Some examples of reviews are as follows: An unnamed critic wrote about Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” "Shall we frankly declare that after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin's arguments, we remain unconvinced.” In 1948, a reviewer dismissed Gore Vidal's novel “The City and the Pillar” as "pornography" not because of sexual content but because it was about the shame of two gay men in love. In the review of Christopher Isherwood’s’ “Novella Goodbye to Berlin” and the character of Sally Bowles, both of which inspired the musical and movie Cabaret. NYT reviewer gave a mixed praise for the author's gifts: "Isherwood is a real novelist, a real minor novelist." For Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 book “Interpreter of Maladies” Caleb Crain gave a lukewarm review for author’s plain language.

“The Souls of Black Folk” a 1903 work by W. E. B. Du Bois, which is a seminal work in American history and a cornerstone of African-American literature used the term "double consciousness" applying it to the idea that Black people must always have two fields of vision. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how whites view them. The NYT review contains significant use of “N” word, in fact, eight times in the first paragraph alone, and there are eight paragraphs in the book review, which illustrates the height of bigotry even at New York Times. The unnamed reviewer largely focuses on the rivalry of W.E.B. Du Bois with Booker T. Washington who were two dominant leaders of African Americans, and NYT takes the side of Washington for his views that African Americans would be better off to remain separate from whites than to attempt desegregation as long as whites granted Black Americans access to economic progress and education. In 1981,Toni Morrison stated that "I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don't care if the critic likes or dislikes it."

The book is significantly edited and not all NYT book reviews are found. It is of historical interest to read as how African American authors were treated in literary world.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

It is more of a collection of reviews and things that were published in the NYT Book Review. Some of which are quite awesome - there are reviews by Alice Walker, Joan Didion, and Eudora Welty among others. There are some issues, including one by Alice B. Tolkas.

Yet - there is so little genre reviews included. And while that is understandable, it is strange. It is mentioned when the Review started its dedicated crime fiction column, but not when it started dedicated fantasy/sci-fi and romance columns. The bestseller section does not include when the audio and ebook versions were included. Or even the separation of children's books from it.

I also wish there had been more negative or even panning reviews. I can understand why some of the reviews were chosen but some of the quotes in the little footnote bits were far funnier.

3.5

[Stetson · Rating 3 out of 5]

For being an anthology of reviews from the NYT Book Review over the last 125 years, this should have been significantly better. Of course, there are interesting reviews in this, and many major cultural touchstones in literature are reviewed, but a number of the inclusions here are questionable. This should have been all bangers.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I expected more actual reproductions of reviews, articles, covers, and even ads. The reproductions we do get are tiny, and instead, we get mostly excerpts and lots of photographs that are often not relevant. Very glad I read a library copy and didn't splurge on this.

[Furrawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great idea that fell short on the execution. Such fascinating stuff yet a page would be wasted with a single paragraph in HUGE letters. Another page would have a newspaper clipping so small that even the iphone 13 pro max could not magnify it to legibility before the fuzziness of magnification re-rendered it to an illegible state.

The idea and some of the content was truly fab. Unfortunately, the execution was a fail.

Expect to be frustrated and you’ll find some great things in this book.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a mostly self-congratulatory compilation of entries from the 125-year history of the NYT Book Review. It’s a big coffee table book, and entertaining to read in small doses. The focus here is almost exclusively on fiction, with a smattering of biography.

It’s often interesting to see how novels which are now widely regarded as classics were first received. Sometimes their greatness was recognized immediately. But for others the first reviews were amusingly mediocre.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure Pleasure

I’ve been a fan of The New York Times Book Review since I was a kid in the 70s. I still read it today. Really loved this book and it was so wonderful to read. I can’t recommend it enough!

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, it's really a coffee table book with the full page author photos and occasional graphic representations of reviews, but the guts of the book are the meaty historical reviews, some by famous authors themselves.

They highlight some swings and misses (Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22), but mostly celebrate the acknowledged successes that have held up over time. This is a book where a reader can browse, looking for the original reviews of favorite books to see what the NYT reviewer thought about it at the time.

There's some self-examination here, as they acknowledge they were late to catch up to the importance of literature by Black authors. While there are some reviews of gay issues (notably the non-fiction account “And the Band Played On” about the AIDS crisis), there seems to be a lack of representation of alternative voices. It's mostly white, male, and largely American authors who were reviewed in the past 125 years. The women authors tend to be intellectuals, some writing about feminist issues, some about women's sexuality (“The Hite Report”). There's very little coverage of LGBTQIA+ texts or authors.

Still, it's a fun book to leaf through, and might actually inspire a reader to revisit a book, or get around to reading that classic 20th century text they'd been meaning to get t

[Nan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New York Times Book Review's 125th anniversary in 2021 gave rise to this hefty collection of actual reviews, articles, and interviews from its storied history. Seeing how The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird and tons more were originally reviewed is a treat. (Incidentally, Anne of Green Gables and Catch-22 were among those panned.) An extensive piece about the history of the publication also comes to terms with its slowness in covering diverse writers. Yes, you can check this volume out of the library, but it's so extensive it's worth purchasing so you can savor it a bit at a time. A gem.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I added a ton of good stuff to my TBR, by skimming my way through this fascinating volume.

[Muhammad Ahmad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be a very good volume if it hadn't include an obtuse and malicious review of Hannah Arendt.

[Maksim Karpitski · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's an exceptionally illuminating book, in that, insubstantial as it is, this collection of snippets does let one see how vapid and narrow-minded the criticism of this most esteemed magazine mostly was. Indeed, it's the fitting reflection of its white male upper middle-class values and a suitable subject for a Wes Anderson movie. Since he already did The New Yorker, well, why not this some day.
One of the most intelligent pieces here is the second introduction, A Review of the Review, written by Parul Sehgal.

[Scott Eggerding · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book as a gift for Christmas and, at the risk of alienating my family, I read it straight through. Reading the first impressions of books we now call classics was compelling and thrilling. As a weekly reader of the book review for nearly 30 years and an occasional reader before then, the sheer volume of books that are published and the small percentage that get reviewed make the Review a true bell weather of literary permanence. I enjoyed reading when the reviewer missed a classic, but was even more impressed when someone “got it right” from the start. Of course there are many missing books and important missing authors, so maybe there will be a sequel!

[Heather M L · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a treasure trove. Boom reviews, many by authors, pictures of authors, pictures of books, interviews with authors!

There are a few misses - certain books not showcased that probably didn’t make it past the chopping block in what I imagine was a tough edit. But my goodness! It’s so brilliantly designed and compiled. I’m absolutely in love with this book!


The only downside is the lack of an index. But seriously…who is complaining!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

My sisters and I grew up in a book-reading family, and our home included bookcases in every room. In keeping with our family norms, my younger sister gave me a book of book reviews for Christmas.

The New York Times Book Reviews is a multi-textural piece of art. It weaves in 125 years’ worth of selected book reviews, information about authors and reviewers, photos of writers and readers, and the history of the “New York Times Book Review.”

If you are a fellow bibliophile, you, too, might be introduced to books or authors you’d like to read. Or see how others view books you love and hate and every emotion in between. Or allow yourself to be bedazzled by the writing of the reviews. Or learn more about the books that have affected previous generations and helped them sort out world history or their personal experiences.

Some reviews pointed me to books I’d never heard about before, but they are now on my short list. Books like:
Hiroshima by John Hersey, a former war correspondent (1946) (six stories of ordinary people).
Dispatches by Michael Herr (1978) (a Vietnam correspondent for Esquire).
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (2014) (memoir in verse). And more.

After reading some reviews, I’m not incurious, but definitely disinclined to read the book in question. I don’t have a list of these because I didn’t focus on what I don’t want to read.

Some of my favorite reviews are about books that already have a special place in my heart, like Little Women. Although Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, I agreed wholeheartedly with the anonymous reviewer who wrote in 1902, “Why Miss Alcott Still Lives.”

Some reviews were sheer delights to read, like Eudora’ Welty’s 1952 review of EB White’s Charlotte’s Web, and Margaret Atwood’s paragraph describing The Witches of Eastwick.

The book of reviews also drove me to my dictionary. How could I not look up “contrapuntal,” and “assizes?” How could I not savor “incurious” and determine to use as soon as possible, even if somewhat clunkily?

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History. Edited by Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim. Clarkson, 2021.
For its 125th anniversary, New York Times editors put out a coffee-table tribute to themselves just in time for Christmas last year. I suspect this is a book more often briefly sampled and thumbed through for its vintage pictures than read all the way through. It is limited as a reference book because there is no index, but if you forgo its heft for an electronic copy, there is always word search.
That said, the book is filled with satisfying tidbits. In the early days, the Review concentrated on what it called “Books as News,” often celebrity news, because early twentieth-century authors were more often celebrities than they are these days. As important a writer as Toni Morrison never got the attention to her personal life that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald received. Early author interviews have a more refrained tone than some of the earlier discussions. There is nothing to match the early 20th-century “Authors at Home” interviews with writers like Arthur Conan Doyle. Truman Capote talks interestingly about how he came to write In Cold Blood, but he does not exhibit the exuberance that made him a late-night talk-show star.
Recently, there have been more long-form essays in the manner of the New York Review of Books—which, by the way, should do a book like this. Several important novelists and public figures have written for the Review, among them Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Bill Clinton. Especially impressive are Margaret Atwood’s appreciation of Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon’s review of Love in the Time of Cholera.
Of course, reviewers get it wrong sometimes. The Review ignored The Waste Land, was baffled without appreciating Finnegans Wake, and did not see any merit to Catch-22. Unsurprisingly, the editors feature reviews that got it right and give themselves a well-deserved pat on the back. 4 stars.

[Gary Sassaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will confess that I didn't read all of this fascinating history of the storied (pun definitely intended) New York Times Book Review. It isn't the kind of book you read cover to cover, to be honest, but it is certainly one to be savored. Wonderfully designed, this treasure trove of essays, reprints, photos, covers, and yes—book reviews—is doled out in bite-size segments arranged in chronological order from the paper's first tentative stabs at exploring book reviews and reporting on the publishing scene to its current status as the paper of record (at least each Sunday in the Book Review section). I gravitated most to the segments about books I read and authors I've loved and you will, too, but it's great to see how the Book Review section grew and evolved over the last century and a quarter. It's a bit pricey (I got it as a gift ... thank god for Wishlists), but I guarantee if you sit down with this book in a library or bookstore, time will pass quickly as you page through it and stop and read the segments that grab you. One minor quibble: Ken Tucker's review of Art Spiegelman's MAUS doesn't include any illustrations from that ground-breaking graphic novel, even though it seems to be in awe of the fact that the reviewer is talking about comics ("Does it seem odd to speak of comic strips in such serious terms?"), although he does acknowledge the medium's popularity in Europe and Japan. Since Tucker talks in length about the illustrative style of Spiegelman's work, it would have been nice to include a panel or two or even a page (this may be a problem in this book only ... I'm not sure if the original review—published in 1985—featured any art; the review was based on Spiegelman's original Maus stories in his self-published comics magazine, RAW).

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an oddity to me. A wonderful oddity, but an oddity nonetheless. This is a coffee table book. In size and presumably in intent, this is a coffee table book. In my experience with coffee table books, which I used to have many of for some reason, they're supposed to be easy to flip through, largely consisting of pictures that catch the eye. But this is a coffee table book collecting things written by people responding to things written by people. It's a code table book full of words, not pictures. I guess you're supposed to flip around in it and find an era or book/author you're interested in and read it.

You're not supposed to read it straight through. I did that, but with large breaks between reading because this isn't something you're supposed to sit and read forever. Or is it? It seems odd to do so.

The content curation is all over the place, making this as eclectic as possible within the limited confines of The New York Times Book Review. There are highlights from various time periods, some emphasis on notable works by minorities, and a little fun with reviews that completely missed what the public response ended up being for a book. Honestly, I think I'd love an entire book of NYTBR complete misses. I don't think that they'd be up for showing that they're not the true make or break for books, though.

This review was far overdue. I received the book in a Goodreads Giveaway some time ago. Like I said, it's a coffee table book and not a book meant to be read straight through. It's a worthwhile tome to have sitting around due to the historical reviews and the ability to see how the Book Review has changed over time, but I think it fails as a book you keep on display in the hopes that it generates a conversation.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This compilation revived in me the sense of eagerness that I enjoyed every Sunday of my young life, and often in the days between publication of The Book Review, as it was quite possible to run out of Sunday before running out of reading material in the The Book Review.

The Book Reviews were of substance, a concept now archaic in reviewing, which has fully degenerated into blurby endorsements.

It is edifying to look back in time, and this anthology permits this, but with what appear to be now de rigueur apologies for history being what it is. I do not recall that the volume includes "trigger" warnings or exhortations to retreat to safe places and to crayon. That surely counts in the editors' favor, but the notion of issuing florid apologies to impose current mores on the past is noxious at best. Such measures may provide the publisher with comfort, however false, against charges by those distressed by the publications, but such measures never fail to insult the reader with the obvious, and often a lecture to boot.

Granted, the hazards of failing to breast-beat over the past are real, for a whole generation has thrown Flannery O'Connor into the dustbin of history. Thus they will never read, and never awaken, to her on-the-scene perceptions of social change during the mid-20th century. Thus they will never know what they are missing, which, one supposes, is as fair a definition of ignorance, here willful, as one might come up with.

I would strongly recommend this volume were it freed of lamentations.

[Connie Ciampanelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Christmas gift from my husband, The New York Times Book Review: 125 Year of Literary History is a treasure, one that I will keep close at hand forevermore.

Visually stunning, this compendium, which spans NYT book reviews from 1896 to 2021, is overflowing with endlessly fascinating material. Almost a scrapbook in its design, it is chock full of original reviews, thoughtful essays, fun ephemera, and a well-chosen selection of letters to the editor. Full page portraits of authors, both black and white and in full color, from George Bernard Shaw in 1889 to David Sedaris in 2020, fill every chapter. (The study of William Faulkner took my breath away). Included in each section are wonderful b&w photos of people reading in a wide variety of settings.

From Henry James' plays (1896) to Tommy Orange's There There (2021), reviews run the gamut, of course, from raves to hatchet jobs. Of particular fun is reading reviews of older, well known and revered (or not) books as they were initially assessed. So too is reading authors' reviews of their peers' work.

This is a volume, once read from cover to cover, to be dipped into and relished time and time again. It is a bottomless delight for any book lover.

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

You read this book because you like reading about reading books. And you like reading the writing of the kinds of people who like reading books.

You also like looking at books. This book has many pictures of books and pictures of the people who write books. Sometimes the pictured people who write books also write about the books they've written or respond in writing to the writings of those who wrote about the books that they've written.

You also like old things and this thing is old. The best things about this thing are the old things, the ones that make you feel like you're tapping into an ancient throughline, that you're participating in something broad and noble. It feels less good when to you when the notes are more modern and you see yourself as you are and the times which you understand and are unable to romanticize the otherness of this library book with pretty pictures.

You also like that this book has inspired you to check out so many other books from the library. It's fun to hold and it's full of books. And you like that. Not enough to need to spend more time with it, but enough.

[Forest · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is basically the biggest copy of the new york times book review you could read, which for someone like me who reads the review religiously, is a field day. this was essentially the best of the best - reviews of classic landmark books when they were originally published, often written by famous authors in their own right, plus lists, artwork, photographs, letters to the editor, and other collected ephemera. does it take itself too seriously? yes, obviously. it's biased. but it was still deeply entertaining, like being surrounded by great literary thinkers throughout history. it's technically a coffee table book and I doubt it was intended to be read in one sitting, but that's what I did, and I'll probably do it again. I had a lot of fun.

[Nancy Wellinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you can get through the early reviews of books I've never heard of or don't care about, this book is like watching a 125-year parade of the most influential books and the thinking that surrounded them. I was surprised by the sometimes racist, sexist, elitist nature of the earliest reviews, but they reflected the times (lower case t). Once the book moved into more recognizable times, increasingly interesting reviews, interviews and lively letters to the editors delved into the great books of our time, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Beloved to Harry Potter and Where the Wild Things Are. It made me want to squeeze even more books into my crowded shelves.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look at the development of the review over the years. Its beginnings are humble and I appreciate the work of those who saw its value, making it what it is today. Astoundingly an early controversy centered on what books were appropriate for women! Some books, popular when published, have disappeared while some that weren't widely read when published are now classics. If you need inspiration for titles, this is a good one to check for ideas. My TBR is overly full but I did make note of some authors to check.

[Kier Scrivener · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved seeing the first reviews of influenctial books and ones forgotten by history. It is a love letter to history and literary history. And also confronts it's own history in silencing and ridiculing minorities and mostly reviewing books by white men.

I would recommend it to any book lover!

And on a side note how much love The Haunting of Hill House made me so happy! It's full of reviews, interviews, letters to the editors, and all the fun and sass of reviewing.

[Valerie Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this to get ideas for my list for next year, but it's so much more. I didn't know that authors sometimes published reviews, such as frequent critics Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion. I didn't know about the legendary exchange between Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. They also showed when the review missed the mark on books that would become beloved. Very interesting to read.