In the past I have explained that I often try to use my column to recommend books rather than strictly review. This isn't necessarily a different thing as far as technical writing (even positive recommendations need to be thorough) but it does mean that if I don't like a book it will likely not show up there. I do this not because I am afraid to offend (I just turned in a review that carried the phrase "self-serving at best" for Booklist) but because I just don't have a lot of room to cover books. With more than 200,000 visitors each month to the site (no idea how many to my column) I regard that coverage as fairly important to the titles which show up there. So if I don't like a book I was planning to review, the question becomes whether or not I should give it some of that space.

In other words, how careful should I be about filling that literary real estate?

Usually negative reviews are not an issue because I don't bother finishing a book I don't like (unless it is for Booklist where the rules are set by others). At Bookslut I can review whatever books I choose to. I try to choose carefully and most of the time I don't have a problem. But in the case of War is, which I just finished last night, I was hoping very much to include it in my March column and now I just don't think I can. Ironically, the column was largely planned after I saw War is in the catalog last year. I had not written a nonfiction column on war books for teens and could see the value of it. Over the past few months as I selected titles, it shifted to a column on foreign relations (which includes war) and War Is... was still a title I planned to include. Until I finished reading it.

This is a tricky book to consider because it is a collection and in pretty much every collection there are going to be some contributions you enjoy and others you do not. I expected that. But I have to like more than I dislike and that was not the case. I found some of the selections to be outdated for the teen audience it was aimed at and others to be just odd choices that did not seem to convey much information at all. (There is a group of letters from an American soldier in WWI who saw no action and instead wrote home about being alternately thrilled and bored by Europe. As few American students know anything about this war I was confused as to why this example was chosen for the most significant conflict of the 20th century.) I also began to see some old messages presented yet again: that war is hell, but going to war makes you appreciate life more (this would be the "I didn't love life until I got a dread disease" example); that we fight for our buddies not for ideals (anyone who has ever seen The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Black Hawk Down or any one of a million other war movies in which this was the point please raise your hand) and war is worse than you could possibly expect and will seriously screw you up (see very nearly every Vietnam movie ever made except The Green Berets, and all poems by Sigfried Sassoon who said it best).

I know it is hard to say anything new about something as old as war but that is kind of like saying you can't say anything new about life and death, period. Paul Fleischman's marvelous Dateline Troy showed how the ancient Greeks can be modernized and Three Kings blew the door off of every war movie in recent years when it showed how hypocrites can thrive even in a war zone. (Incidentally The Best Years of Our Lives brought PTSD home to American audiences in the post WWII era in an equally impressive manner.) And I'm certainly not averse to reprinting poems or excerpts from previously published materials but there should be a twist that makes the selections work as a whole rather than just..."here they are". Samuel Hynes did this quite well with The Soldier's Tale where he looked at first person accounts from soldiers who served in WWI, WWII and Vietnam (and also POW camps ,etc) to explore what war was like. This is an excellent book that takes the reader into multiple facets of the war experience and in the end reveals a great deal about what is the same and different about the three chosen conflicts. You leave it knowing more but after War is I found myself mostly just confused. (And it really didn't help that the only mention of women at war was an essay on sexual harassment and PTSD. Especially after reading I'll Pass For Your Comrade this was a cliche of mammoth proportions that left my eyes rolling.)

All of this leaves me thinking I should just pass on the review and focus more on other books for the column (another of which I could fit in now). There were certainly a couple of essays that I thought were very well done but overall the collection was unbalanced and lacked coherence about what it wanted to say and how it wanted to say it. I could say all of this in my column but I don't think I want to. It just does not seem the proper use of column inches. I have to ask myself if it is more beneficial to readers to tell them about a book I think is effective or one I believe is not. The question (the eternal question) is always "What do readers want?" That's what I spend my time trying to figure out as I form these columns and sometimes, I just don't know.