December 7, 2008
Reviewers who bring their own agendas
I got a Google alert a few minutes ago noting a review of
Romance on the Road
had appeared on a site called goodreads.com. The review is more than a year old but just now reached me.Here is what it states:
Barbara's reviewThe problem with reviews such as these is that the writer not only brings her own agenda to the topic, but she twists the reality of what is actually written in my book to suit it. Any good debater selectively picks facts to support or tear down an argument. But a debater who goes farther and misrepresents the truth will learn just one thing: He or she loses her argument on the facts.
rating: (1 star)
recommended for: morally bankrupt ugly Americans out to exploit people in poor countries
status: Read in June, 2007What a horrible view of the world! The author fills a whole book with rationalizations of why it's really a good thing for women from rich industrialized parts of the world to have random sex with any man they meet in the developing world, because if he's poor enough, he's desperate enough, and it's okay if you don't take him home afterwards because he won't be happy back in the US anyhow. The ultimate "ugly American," treating people as things to be exploited, but with chapters and chapters of why she was really doing a good thing. And the writing's bad, too!
I tacked on the following comment on this review:
I am the author. This review is preposterous on every level. Romance on the Road includes both positive and negative aspects of sex between Western women and foreign men.Unprofessional critics don't appreciate the importance of sticking to the facts. One reviewer at Small Press Magazine, more than a decade ago, gave a critical review of my first book,1 -- Not all the contacts are random -- many are heartfelt and one in 30 lead to permanent relationships. Not all the men are poor. My extensively sourced book describes numerous relationships where the woman is poor and the man is astoundingly wealthy, see the chapter on Asia noting Irish working women who married Indian maharajas. In many other cases, we see educated foreign men who have a lot in common with Western women particularly expatriates, and who create happy international marriages.
2 -- There is an entire chapter on ethics and etiquette noting that the man is not an actor in your personal drama and is a man with real feelings. He is not a sperm donor, he is not someone to treat caddishly. The fact that the writer of this review glosses over pages 360-378 -- 18 full pages on the exact topic of ethics! -- tells me she either hasn't read Romance on the Road or is approaching it with an unfair and closed mind.
3 -- Asserting that I wrote or in any way imply "it's okay if you don't take him home afterwards because he won't be happy back in the US anyhow" is such a complete falsehood that I will contact the administrator of this site to ask whether this violates the goodreads.com terms of service.
4 -- "Treating people as things to be exploited" -- find one passage that states or implies this.
5 -- "And the writing's bad, too!" So very very sorry I did not mimic one of your favorite authors such as John Irving (ha ha, LOW BROW! mass market paperback) or Ivan Doig, whoever he is. My goal was obvious: an exhaustively researched and meticulously honest look at sex travel. If you were a writer or critic, you would know it is only fair to evaluate a book on its broad goals, not what it is NOT trying to do. David Simon, author of The Corner and Homicide, told me that once. It remains true.
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet
. Problem was, he mangled the facts to paint a negative picture; where other critics had been impressed with how up-to-the-minute my collection of adventure tales was, he dismissed them as (!) having been stale stories from the 1980s. The falsehood bought down his entire critique. I reluctantly contacted the editors of Small Press. They let the critic go and commissioned a new reviewer, whose review was very fair (glowing, in fact).
If you look, for example, at the reviews of Romance on the Road on Amazon.com
P.S. Lamont chuckled away at Barbara's critical review and had two suggestions about how to improve my rebuttal. He suggested that for No. 4, to say instead of " 'Treating people as things to be exploited' -- find one passage that states or implies this," to say instead, "I've attempted in a scholarly tradition to given sources and examples for everything in my book, are you able to give some citations for this assertion?"
And for No. 5, he suggests saying, "Obviously I'm not that good a writer, since you failed to understand what I was trying to express, although no one else has raised this concern."
One final thought: The charge of exploitation commonly arises in for those who focus exclusively on the most extreme examples of female tourism found in the Caribbean and Africa, where racial, age and economic differences are most obvious to the outside observer. But these women are merely part of a worldwide phenomenon that also includes Nepal, Thailand and other parts of Asia; a phenomenon that includes expatriate women and Peace Corps volunteers who choose to marry their foreign boyfriends; where Japanese women and even indigenous people in Borneo actively seek out foreigners for sexual relationships; and a myriad of other permutations. It's a widely varied phenomenon, and one that doesn't preclude genuine and egalitarian partnerships.
