The Life and Death of the Book Review

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. [...] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics, instead taking their lead from celebrities like Oprah, or online influencers. The authoritative middlebrow cultural figures who once instructed Americans on what to read from perches at the Saturday Review and the New Yorker no longer exist (Adam Gopnik does not dictate American reading habits). The very idea of such cultural authority is widely dismissed as elitist. David A. Bell, Liberties