Reviews
The New York Times reviewer Charles McGrath recommended The Devil in Dover as a starting place to study
... the great American tradition of anti-intellectualism, which seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, even as the country supposedly becomes better educated, and about the strange way we’re turning the court system, of all places, into a referee on scientific principles.
In the Texas Observer, Ruth Pennebaker called it an "excellent, troubling book" and added:
Reading The Devil in Dover, I saw members of my extended family, best friends from my earliest years, neighbors, shop owners, acquaintances, people I went to church and Sunday school with when I was a child, people who passed the communion tray to me once a month when we all knelt at the altar. ... I love many of those people, and I know they love me. But our hearts harden toward one another on issues like evolution, intellectual freedom, science, and tolerance toward different views and people.
In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review on the "religion beat," Tim Townsend praised the book for giving readers a feeling of what it was like leading up to the trial and immediately afterwards, but criticized it for having unnecessary subplots about Lebo's personal experiences with her father and her own beliefs.
The Patriot-News in Harrisburg took the opposite tack, saying "This is the fourth book about the Dover case, but Lebo avoids the problems of her predecessors, who didn't know the territory as well and sometimes bogged down in courtroom testimony"
Read more about this topic: The Devil In Dover
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“Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books—same reviews.”
—John Osborne (1929–1994)
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
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