For most of my writing life, I've been involved in literary journalism, primarily as a book critic, book review editor, and book columnist for many newspapers and magazines. Mainly my work has focused on criticism, the culture of magazines, and travel.

My books have emerged directly from these interests. My first was Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories, an unusual collection of tales, and the second was Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, a tough but sympathetic look at this perennially troubled field that straddles the worlds of literature and commerce.

My new book is Long Way True.

Long Way True is the story of a journey without maps. Its subject is culture shock, its setting the New Guinea jungle, and its cast a fascinating tribe called the Baining and a young couple who fall headlong into the gap between two worlds.

In 1969 my husband and I spent 16 months in New Guinea, living in two remote villages with the Baining. The trip was a fiasco: we couldn't make sense of this enigmatic people's lives, and we argued constantly. Our return to the States was an extended disorientation: we couldn't make sense of our own lives, and we argued constantly. Jeremy left the field of anthropology: he couldn't write about the Baining. I, a writer, couldn't write about the Baining. Indeed, it took 40 years--and a return to New Guinea--to lay this ghost to rest.

Long Way True is a wry memoir that looks back on our traumatic journey to the bush. It chronicles our intense months in the jungle, living with a people whose extremely different culture seemed to undermine our own. The narrative moves briskly through the years back home, where I struggled to frame this experience that came between us, bound us together, and set us apart from a world we could only see as artificial and pointlessly ambitious. And finally the story, framed at last, concludes in our moving New Guinea reunion with the tribe who so upended our lives.

By the time we went back, what had once seemed tragic, then melodramatic, had taken on comic tones. We could see our young selves as two innocents abroad, bumbling in a very foreign land. Written in the tradition of self-mocking travel writing, Long Way True has a humor that readers will enjoy. For all its comedy, though, this is a disarming narrative about dealing with the profound differences between cultures: the assumptions we bring, the fears we have, and the judgments we make. In a world deeply divided along national, tribal, and religious lines, Long Way True is a meaningful and poignant story for our time.

In the meantime, I've noticed that once again people are writing articles about the lack of critical reviews. For an in-depth discussion of why so many reviews are too positive, please take a look at Faint Praise--described on this page--which deals with the subject in depth. For more information about Faint Praise--and book reviewing in general--please take a look at my other web site: (www.reviewingbooks.com).

And for more information about my earlier book, Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories, please see:www.home.comcast.net/~gailpool

---Faint Praise should be considered mandatory reading for anyone aspiring to become a book reviewer, and is especially valuable reading for authors, publishers, academicians, and the general reading public.--Midwest Book Review, September 3, 2007

---In the future, freshly appointed book editors at our daily newspapers should be handed a copy of Gail Pool's Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. They could use it: It is a very commonsensical, clear-headed and knowledgeable analysis of the current state of professional book reviewing.--Jerome Weeks, artsjournal, National Book Critics Circle, Critical Mass, August 2007

---Pool's book is timely. It is also well-conceived and well-researched. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a more thoughtful, informative book about the work I've done for nearly 40 years.--Steve Weinberg, Boston Globe, October 27, 2007

---Everyone in the field will applaud Pool's passionate insistence on the importance to literary culture of the serious, informed critique, which is increasingly endangered and in need of such vigorous support.--Publishers Weekly, June 4, 2007

---Faint Praise is a thorough look at the current state of book reviewing in America...The examples are entertaining--and revealing. Our assessment: A-: Solid overview and discussion--The Complete Review, July 2007

---I will be referring back to this earnest and informed book from time to time, and I recommend it as an introduction to mainstream book reviewing in America.--Tom Christensen, Right Reading, June 2007

---Pool's book is a clarion call for a return to a vigorous kind of criticism, based on sound, logical thinking and the precise use of language.--Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag, July 2007

---Some well-deserved pats on the back and slaps upside the head.--Kirkus, June 2007

---If you're a book reviewer (aspiring or established), or simply want to understand book reviewing better, there's no doubt: You must read Gail Pool's Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Period.--Erika Dreifus, Practicing Writing, September 18, 2007

---Faint Praise puts book reviews in context better than anthing else I've read.--Susan Thomsen, Chicken Spaghetti (blog)

---[Readers]...will quite likely never read reviews the same way in the future as they have in the past.--Steve Weinberg, Hartford Courant, July 22, 2007

---I think everyone who blogs would be well-served by reading this one book.--My Individual Take (On the Subject)(blog)

---...an impressively sane examination of the befuddled state of book criticism. Among the volume's virtues is a clear and balanced description of what reviewing, at its best, can and should be.--Bill Marx, The Arts Fuse, July 27, 2007

---Book reviewing faces its own "silent spring," Gail Pool warns in her new book, flashing a distress signal over the endemic rot and habitat destruction laying waste to the field of letters, and doing her darnedest to make people care. --James Wolcott, The New Republic, December 4, 2007

---If you care about the fate of book reviews...Faint Praise...is a book you should care about.--Michael Merschel, book review editor, Dallas Morning News, August 2007

---Highly recommended.--C. M. Mayo, Madam Mayo (Writing Blog), January 2009

---Veteran reviewer Gail Pool comes at the problem of the declining and frequently abysmal quality of book reviews in America, across the publishing spectrum, from a down-to-earth, nitty-gritty, practical perspective...to yield a most usable and rewarding guide to the book review business.--Anis Shivani, American Book Review, November/December 2008

---...A thoughtful and thought-provoking guide to the artistry and scholarship, not to mention the agony and ecstasy that is part of good book reviewing...Pool's crisp, intelligent, and witty style moves the reader from the lonely and unrewarding depths to the lofty heights of book reviewing.--Lawrence Rubin, Journal of Popular Culture, August 2008

---Excellent.--Laura Hazard Owen, Publishing Trends, October 2009

---Pool's analysis is as wide-ranging as it is hard-hitting. Faint Praise is a brave polemic, written out of a profound love of literature, evident on every page. --Megan Marshall, Radcliffe Quarterly, Winter 2008

---Everything you need to know about book reviewing can be found in Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America by Gail Pool.--Tony Miksanek, Letters, "The Book Room," Chicago Sun-Times.

When Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America was published in 2007, the main news in the field was the rapidly declining number of reviews in newspapers and magazines. At this point, their number seems to have stabilized, and I hope that the discussion can shift from their quantity to their quality, which is the central issue of my book.

The response to Faint Praise when it appeared was favorable at such publications as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Midwest Review, American Book Review, the Boston Globe, the Hartford Courant, Rain Taxi, the Radcliffe Quarterly, Technical Communication, the Journal of Popular Culture and NRC Handelsblad, a major newspaper in the Netherlands. (In fact, the book seems to have triggered a serious discussion of reviewing in the Netherlands.) James Wolcott wrote about Faint Praise at length in The New Republic.

Both the book and the subject of reviewing have received a great deal of attention online. Thoughtful, positive reviews have appeared at the Complete Review, the artsjournal blog BookDaddy, That Shakespearean Rag, RightReading, My Individual Take (On the Subject), the Arts Fuse, Practicing Writing, My Sweet Home Alameda, and Texas Pages, the blog for the Dallas Morning News. Scott McLemee praised the book on his blog, Inside Higher Ed., and Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, reprinted the long artsjournal essay by Jerome Weeks. It was discussed on The Walt Bodine Show (NPR), and I've been interviewed by Colin Marshall at The Marketplace of Ideas, by Bill Marx at The Arts Fuse, by Ramona Koval on The Book Show, and by Mayra Calvani at blogcritics.org.

Below is a description of Faint Praise. For more information about the book and book reviewing in general, please visit my web site (www.reviewingbooks.com). It now includes a bibliography of book reviewing, which I hope readers will find useful; a compilation of quotations about book reviewing, which I hope readers will find entertaining; and a brief biographical note, which provides links to several of my earlier articles on book reviewing and--a digression--a travel piece I wrote for the New York Times about a trip to New Guinea. The web site is still (always) in-progress, and I welcome comments, suggestions, corrections, and queries.

Many critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.--Murray Kempton

The earliest book reviews in America appeared at the end of the 18th century. They have been influencing--and frustrating--people ever since. For two centuries, reviews have set our literary agenda, helping to determine not only what we read but what we think about what we read. And for two centuries, critics-of-the-critics, often reviewers themselves, have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, or dull. By now, so many essays have been written lamenting the sorry state of American reviewing that they comprise a minor genre. Yet no book has explored in depth the reasons for this perennial failure or the question of how reviewing might improve.

I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where for many years I taught Writing for Publication at the Radcliffe Seminars. I am also editor of Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories, which was published in 2000 by the University of Missouri Press.

Work Previously Published:

This anthology, the first of its kind, offers seventeen modern letter stories, written by an internationally diverse group of authors that includes Alice Munro, Julio Cortazar, Nadine Gordimer, Torgny Lindgren and Tadeusz Borowski. These are unusual, original, and truly wonderful tales. They are variously comic, satirical, poignant, or tragic. They are letters written from the Canadian wilderness, from a private school in Geneva, from a concentration camp, from beyond the grave. What they share is the epistolary form: each story creates a distinctly different variation on this intriguing theme.

"The best of the stories are gems and make Other People's Mail an extraordinarily valuable book to have on the shelf. Other People's Mail is an anthology that needs to exist."--Eric Miles Williamson, American Book Review