Lately, manifestos on the matter of book reviewing seem to be cropping up all over. “The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers,” wrote Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review this fall, just months after Cynthia Ozick, lamenting in these pages the decline in popular conversation about books, declared, “What is not happening is literary criticism.” Nor is such exasperation confined to our more seasoned commentators. In the new literary journal n+1, dissatisfaction found a specific target, The New Republic: “Its method was wholly negative… indiscriminately so.” And a 2003…