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Harry Potter and the Instant ReviewCan you really review a 784-page book in an afternoon?

By Jack ShaferPosted Thursday, July 19, 2007, at 12:31 PM ET

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"I knew that regardless of the literary merits of the book, the human being that was going to appear from those pages would be superior to the people in the current administration," Prose says.

Washington Post editorial writer and columnist Anne Applebaum (a friend and former regular Slate contributor) wrote a sweeping assessment of My Life for her paper's June 23 op-ed page, and while it's not billed as such, it's a review in every respect but name.

"It isn't just that it's dull, like so many political memoirs, or that the sections on Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky are weirdly abrupt and uninformative; it's utterly lacking in perspective," Applebaum writes in her piece.

Did Applebaum read the whole thing? No. Just "600-odd pages," she e-mails.

"I read the early chapters on Clinton's childhood, high school, and Oxford experiences, skipped the Arkansas governorship, and went on to the presidency. Then I got stuck. Pretty quickly, it becomes obvious how disorganized the book is. As it happens, I do read unusually fast and always have. But even if I'd had six months, I wouldn't have learned more than in the several hours I had," she writes in e-mail.

(Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, another blitzer, did not make herself available to discuss her piece.*)

Having written this column in my head before I started to report it, I expected to conclude that no book review should be written on amphetamines against a short deadline. Instead, I've concluded that blitz reviews have their place. To begin with, publisher Knopf encouraged the day-hits of My Life by breaking with the standard procedure in which publishers provide advance review copies to publications but request that no review run until the official publishing date—or until the book appears in bookstores. If Knopf—or Clinton—desire reviews benefiting from longer deadlines, they know how to make that system work. If they want to treat the book as a news event, there's no reason why reviewers shouldn't do the same.

But what really convinced me of the value of blitz reviews was the Washington Post review by Walter Isaacson. The Post gave Isaacson days rather than hours to write the piece, posting it to the Web on June 28 at 5:41 a.m.

At 2,000 words, Isaacson's slow-food take is much longer than its fast-food cousins. It's also better-written—the jokes are sharper, the allusions better-grounded, the rhythm better-paced. But Isaacson's basic takeaway doesn't differ much from that of instant reviewers Anson, Rutten, Applebaum, and Schwartz: Isaacson finds the first half of the book fascinating but complains that Clinton surrenders to his self-indulgent, psychobabbly, slapdash tendencies in the second half. Clinton should come back in 10 years and rewrite the second half of the book, Isaacson recommends in his conclusion.

From Isaacson's point of view, it sounds like My Life got the instant notices it deserved.

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The "Juicy Bits" treatment of My Life mentioned above was removed from Slate after Knopf protested copyright infringement: See this note from Slate's editor.

Correction, July 1, 2004: In the original version of this story, Associated Press writer Jerry Schwartz was described as a blitz reviewer, and the piece stated that he did not make himself available for an interview. An AP spokesman says Schwartz obtained the book on June 18, so he was not a blitz reviewer. However, the AP did not respond to a request to interview Schwartz. (Return to the corrected sentence.)