The State of First Things, undated

It has now been many months since this once-regular feature appeared.  I started The State of First Things series back when I was trying to figure out if the magazine was still worth reading.  Most of the issues were a bit light on substantive content.  I still read every issue cover to cover, and every now and then a really good article would appear, but mostly each issue was just OK at best.  Then R. R. Reno became the new Editor and Wow! what a difference an editor makes.  I have read 5 issues since he took over.  Five out of the five were amazingly good.  So good, that reviewing them would have been a major time sink.  An issue has 7 essays, and using the standards I was using back when this feature was regular, I would have reviewed at least 6 of the 7 articles from each issue.  Moreover Reno’s editorial remarks are also always worth reviewing.  [And the short bits at the end are fun—not Neuhaus good, but still good.]

The only real problem with the magazine right now is that the Book Review section is still terribly weak.  I have been trying got figure out why.  I think it is the books they are choosing.  From the last four issues, the books which got the long reviews are:

Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America

Grafton and Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”

Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist

Farrow, Ascension Theology

Gottleib, Faith and Freedom

The Holy Bible, NIV

Volf, Allah

Wallace, The Pale King

Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow

Kass, Kass and Schaub, What So Proudly We Hail

Smith, et, al., Lost in Translation

Rosenberg, The Atheists’ Guide to Reality

Hancock, The Responsibility of Reason

Clark, Founding the Fathers

Landes, Heaven on Earth

McWilliams, The Democratic Soul and Redeeming Democracy in America

Genzo, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye

Lemert, Why Niebuhr Matters

Burleigh, Moral Combat

Grayling, The Good Book

Now the first thing to notice about that list is that there are not many books on it of which I would have seen the title and thought, “I wonder if that book is any good” or “I can’t wait to read a review of the book.”  So, when the book is not inherently interesting, it is incumbent on the reviewer to convince the reader that the book was worth reviewing.  And on that front, most book reviewers fail miserably.  A good reviewer can write an interesting review of a good or a bad book and the review will be worth reading.  A mediocre reviewer has no hope of writing a good review of a book which has no intrinsic interest to the reader.  Since really good reviewers are rare (though, The New Criterion seems to have a steady supply for some reason), the book review editor of a magazine needs to do a careful job picking the books to be reviewed so that a mediocre reviewer writing a solid review will still be writing something worth reading.  So, here is the question: Does anyone, anyone at all, think that those were the 20 books published at that time which were of greatest interest to readers of a journal like First Things?  Surely, there were better, more interesting books to be reviewed in the realm of Religion and Public Life.  Now don’t get me wrong.  Some of the reviews of those books were really good.  Hart, for example, reviewed the Genzo book, and like everything Hart writes, it was fascinating.  But the average review was a not terribly interesting review of a not terribly interesting book.  Let us hope that the book review section gets livelier in time.

This, however, is just a quibble about the magazine as whole.  First Things has rejoined the New Criterion as Must Reading.