The New York Review of Books - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

The Washington Post calls the Review "a journal of ideas that has helped define intellectual discourse in the English-speaking world for the past four decades.... By publishing long, thoughtful articles on politics, books and culture, defied trends toward glibness, superficiality and the cult of celebrity". In a 2006 New York magazine feature, James Atlas stated: "It's an eclectic but impressive mix that has made The New York Review of Books the premier journal of the American intellectual elite". The Atlantic commented in 2011 that the Review is written with "a freshness of perspective", and "much of it shapes our most sophisticated public discourse." In celebrating the 35th birthday of the Review in 1998, The New York Times commented, "The N.Y.R. gives off rogue intimations of being fun to put out. It hasn't lost its sneaky nip of mischief".

In 2008, Britain's The Guardian deemed the Review "scholarly without being pedantic, scrupulous without being dry". The same newspaper wrote in 2004, "The ... issues of the Review to date provide a history of the cultural life of the east coast since 1963. It manages to be ... serious with a fierce democratic edge. ... It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays ... and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour – even the letters to the editor are footnoted – with great clarity of language." In New York magazine, in February 2011, Oliver Sacks stated that the Review is "one of the great institutions of intellectual life here or anywhere." In 2012, The New York Times described the Review as "elegant, well mannered, immensely learned, a little formal at times, obsessive about clarity and factual correctness and passionately interested in human rights and the way governments violate them."

Known throughout its history as a left-liberal journal, what Tom Wolfe called "the chief theoretical organ of radical chic", the Review has, perhaps, had its most effective voice in wartime. According to a 2004 feature in The Nation,

"One suspects they yearn for the day when they can return to their normal publishing routine – that gentlemanly pastiche of philosophy, art, classical music, photography, German and Russian history, East European politics, literary fiction – unencumbered by political duties of a confrontational or oppositional nature. That day has not yet arrived. If and when it does, let it be said that the editors met the challenges of the post-9/11 era in a way that most other leading American publications did not, and that The New York Review of Books ... was there when we needed it most."

Sometimes accused of insularity, the Review has been called "The New York Review of Each Other's Books". Philip Nobile voiced a mordant criticism along these lines in his book Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books. The Guardian called these accusations "sour grapes". In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "the pages of the 45th anniversary issue, in fact, reveal the actuality of willfully panoramic view".