In today’s online Chronicle of Higher Education J.C. Hallman contributes an essay on “Book Reviewing’s Grunt Squads,” a confession from one of those grad students who served on the squads, and an indictment of sorts, exposing of a system that is full of “irrational contradiction.”

Exhibit B is “the original Kirkus review of Nicholson Baker’s U and I,” which is “nasty right from the start.” 

“What’s notable here, for anyone who’s read U and I, is just how far the review seems from the book it purports to consider”: “Surely nearly 200 pages of dreams, digressions, puns, self-ridicule, and self-congratulation would please the world, or Updike, or someone.”

Here’s the complete article.