Alain de Botton latest author to hit out at reviewer - The Book Depository blog

From the Bookseller:

Alain de Botton, the philosopher and author, is the latest author to launch a counter-offensive against a book reviewer, responding online to a New York Times reviewer with the following words: "I will hate you until the day I die".

The outburst followed a poor review of de Botton's book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Caleb Crain in the New York Times on 24th June. Earlier this week author Alice Hoffman apologised after using her Twitter account to call on her fans to hit back at "snarky critics", and posted contact details of a reviewer she had taken issue with.

Speaking to the Telegraph, De Botton said he posted a response that was intended for Crain alone to read. "It was a private communication to his website, to him as a blogger," he said. "It's appalling that it seems that I'm telling the world." However, he said authors had a right to be angry with unfair reviews. "The New York Times is in its declining years. They don't really care, they quite like to cause a storm."

In the review, Crain accused de Botton of indulging in a "kind of mockery" of those he had interviewed; of "losing track" of the book's aim and reaching "superficial" judgments about people.

What the Bookseller article doesn't say is that de Botton has form here. In February, he had a spat with the blogger infinite thought (the full transcripts of the email conversation between them can be read on the excellent IT site).

To be honest, bloggers who indulge in ad hominem attacks on authors deserve to be taken to task but, simultaneously, authors who let bloggers' attacks bother them need to grow a much thicker skin.