The fates of authors and publishers — not to mention the reading public — depend on book reviews — but who reviews the reviewers? Miss Hardwich undertakes one of the few thorough critiques of the leading popular reviews to appear in recent years and explains why “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” A distinguished novelist and book reviewer herself, Miss Hardwick is the wife of the poet Robert Lowell.

There used to be the notion that Keats was killed by a bad review, that in despair and hopelessness he turned his back to the wall and…