Speaking of "negative reviews" and threatened legal action: have you been following the case of Orlando Figes? Figes has now admitted that he wrote savagely negative reviews of other historians' books (coupled with praise for his own) on Amazon.uk. When one of his maligned colleagues began to work out what Figes was up to, Figes adopted one after another tactic to deflect responsibility for his sleazy secret campaign against his colleagues. Here's The Sunday Times's account:
According to Figes, a bestselling author and history professor at Birkbeck, London University, unspecified “health problems” were responsible for his venomous reviews of rivals’ books behind the cloak of anonymity on the Amazon website. Earlier he had suggested that enemies keen to discredit him had engineered the campaign. Denying that he had anything to do with it, he threatened newspapers and fellow scholars with legal action if they dared to suggest otherwise. Then he outed his wife as the culprit, before finally confessing all.
Bespectacled, serious and intensely intellectual, the 50-year-old Figes does not look the sort to leave such a trail of outrage in his wake. Some authors who experienced his critical drubbings and legal threats were almost incoherent with anger last week.
One newspaper has described Figes as “an academic colossus”. For such a high-profile figure — besides being an acclaimed scholar, he is the son of Eva Figes, the feminist writer, and the brother of Kate Figes, the author and literary editor — Figes remains something of a mystery, even to his admirers. “He’s a very impressive, serious academic but also a superb narrative historian,” said a fellow Russianist, who pleaded anonymity. “He’s a bit of an enigma but he’s not a sinister figure or a freak. He’s a bit of a lad — he’s chatty, supports Chelsea football club and enjoys a joke.”
His victims have been able to extract one wry sliver of humour from the debacle — Figes was exposed using the repressive techniques that he chronicled in his 2007 book The Whisperers, an account of the Russian people’s suffering under Joseph Stalin.
“There has been a lot of fear,” said one maligned author. “His lawyer was made to act a bit like the KGB. It’s pathological behaviour that has had an extremely distorting and damaging effect on the field of Russian history for many years. No one else in the world of scholarship brandishes and uses power in this way.”
Not all of his detractors are indignant authors. “It was absolutely diabolical working for him,” said one of Figes’s former researchers, who asked to remain nameless. “He was quite the most unpleasant person I’ve ever had to work with. The job was all about feeding him and his further glory. He used to sit there with his feet on the desk, lording it over us.”
The article then narrates how Polonsky's "sleuthing" and her discovery of that Figes was behind the poison pen reviews and how Figes then began "issuing libel threats to all and sundry" in an ineffectual attempt to stem the tide of professional scandal. Weirdest of all, I think, is Figes's tactic of blaming the reviews on his wife:
Last weekend the affair took a sensational turn when Figes announced through his lawyer that he had just learnt that his wife had penned the poison reviews.
That seemed unlikely. Stephanie Palmer is a senior law lecturer at Cambridge, a barrister and a member of Blackstone chambers, the human rights specialist. She is also the mother of Figes’s twin daughters, Lydia and Alice. Was it possible that she had stood by and allowed her husband to issue denials and legal threats?
Two days ago Figes’s nerve cracked. “I take full responsibility for posting anonymous reviews on Amazon,” he said. “I am ashamed of my behaviour and don’t entirely understand why I acted as I did.” He pleaded for time to reflect on his actions “with medical help”.
The article concludes by noting the difference between Figes's response to masked Russian police seizing an electronic archive of oral histories Figes had amassed and his treatment of his colleagues' responses to his smear campaign against them:
This principled behaviour was in stark contrast to the threats that Figes instructed his lawyer to make to Service, the Oxford professor of history and Russianist, whose offence was to object to “unpleasant personal attacks in the old Soviet fashion”. Service, who said he and his wife had been “through hell” for nearly two weeks, expressed relief “that this contaminant slime has been exposed to the light and begun to be scrubbed clean”. The affair, in his view, had shown “how dangerous our libel laws are to those who seek to expose malpractice”.
Figes appears to have taken the first steps in the Tiger Woods course of public rehabilitation: confession, remorse and sick leave. Using libel law to suppress academic debate is of a different order from serial infidelity, but then the golfer never grassed up his wife.
Amazon's comments section is quickly becoming known as a place where grudges get settled. There are the angry Kindle users who downgrade books they haven't read simply because publishers don't make e-versions available at the same time as hardbacks. And there are more prominent figures, like British historian Orlando Figes, who recently admitted to anonymously savaging the work of some competitors.
I've always wondered whether Amazon customer reviews make any difference at all to a book's sales or reputation. The presumption seems to be that they do, though I've never seen any evidence to back it up. For myself, whenever I read any review, I find it necessary to make a judgment about the reviewer at the same time tjat I'm considering what to make of what the reviewer has to say. Is that so rare? Of course I understand that someone like Figes might be clever enough to be credible in his poison pen screeds. But it seems to me that hateful reviews on Amazon tend to get high disapproval ratings (from the people who actually "vote" on them, anyway).
The latest issue of the American Book Review arrived in my mailbox today. The title of the editorial--"Criminal Editors"-- immediately caught my eye, and so I read it first. What, I wondered, could that be about? What it's about is a lawsuit an author is bringing in a French court against the editor of an international scholarly journal for publishing a review that basically characterized the plaintiff's book as meticulous but not going as far as it might have in exploring its subject matter. The ABR editorial refers to the review as "negative" (presumably because that's how the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it in its article NYU Professor Faces Libel Lawsuit in France for Refusing to Purge Negative Book Review. Imagine, if every editor had to work in fear that every review that's not a glowing rave might provoke a lawsuit.
Soon after it appeared, Ms. Calvo-Goller wrote to Mr. Weiler, saying that the review, by Thomas Weigend, director of the Cologne Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law and dean of the faculty of law at the University of Cologne, was defamatory. She asked that the review be removed from the site....
....Mr. Weiler refused to remove the review but offered to publish a response from Ms. Calvo-Goller, "so that anyone reading the review would immediately be able to read her reply," an approach that "would have amply and generously vindicated all possible interests of the author of the book," he wrote in the editorial. "I continue to believe that in all the circumstances of the case ... removing the review by Professor Weigend would have dealt a very serious blow to notions of freedom of speech, free academic exchange, and the very important institution of book reviewing."
Faced with what he notes is "the heavy financial burden of defending such a case — expenses which are in large part not recoverable even if acquitted," Mr. Weiler has appealed for "moral and material assistance" from the academic community and writes that he is optimistic that he will be acquitted at trial. "Any other result will deal a heavy blow to academic freedom and change the landscape of book reviewing in scholarly journals, especially when reviews have a cyber presence as is so common today."
You can read this so-called "libelous" review that the author is claiming "could cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion" here. (As someone who has received a few vitriolic reviews in her time, I have to wonder how she would have reacted to receiving an actual hammering.)
The author, by the way, is a senior lecturer at the Academic Centre of Law and Business in Israel. I find myself wondering if she teach law students. Only yesterday I was reminded of all the potential damage John Yoo could be doing in his role as teacher.
I'm also reminded that I recently came across a news item about a lawyer using the law to bludgeon his opponents-- viz., Juneau County Distrinct Attorney (in Wisconsin), Scott Southworth, who
warned that teaching a student how to properly use contraceptives would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor punishable by up to nine months behind bars and a $10,000 fine. He said it would be promoting sex among minors, who are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin.
This is presumably because Wisconsin State has just passed a law "requiring schools that teach sexual education to adopt a comprehensive approach." In Juneau County, at least, the teachers charged with teaching sex education are caught between a rock and a hard place. (The AP story can be read here.) And I'm also wondering whatever could such a law mean, that minors "are not legally allowed to have sex in Wisconsin"? They have a law prohibiting that? I'm wondering what a "minor" is. Any Wisconsin folks reading this who could clue me in? But to get back to Southworth's campaign and the new law:
Wisconsin schools aren't required to teach sex education. But under the new law, which was backed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, schools that do must teach a range of topics, including the benefits of abstinence, the proper use of contraceptives, how to make responsible decisions, and the criminal penalties for underage sex. Parents can choose to keep their children out of the classes.
Southworth says he is not trying to bolster his reputation as a social conservative for a potential run for higher office, but his stance has proved popular with antiabortion groups.
Matt Sande, the legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, which opposes the new law, said every district attorney in Wisconsin should follow Southworth's lead.
Sex education is contributing to the delinquency of a minor? A negative review is libel? Torture is legal and a prerogative of the POTUS?
Using the law to bully people who don't have the resources to defend them has become utterly commonplace. Bet that editor never imagined he'd find himself hauled into court on such a charge.
But do get back to "Criminal Editors," here's Jeffrey R. Di Leo, in his ABR editorial:
If book reviewing is to distance itself from the perception that it is simply a promotional service for the publishing industry, then it needs to engage in legitimate practices....As an editor, I face both positive and negative reviews on a regular basis. The backbone of reviewing rests on reviewers competent to handle the books they have been assigned and level of honesty regarding their responsiveness to the text before them. Reviewers with an ax to grind or a preconceived notion of what they are going to say before they even read the book are to be avoided. However, if a fair assessment of a text results in a negative consequence, then it is the obligation of the reviewer to report it and of the editor to publish it. Anything less compromises the integrity of the review process.
He also notes that reviewers tend to err "on the side of sympathy" when they feel themselves reacting negatively toward a book-- or else simply refuse to write the review.
Justina Robson, by the way, discusses her experience of the costs for reviewers (in the sf field) for writing less than unalloyed praise, in her review of Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes for Strange Horizons this week.