Wasserman (and others) have recently whined about the declining newspaper space devoted to book reviews, and then in what has become the typical fashion of academic and quasi-academic elites they put the blame for such decline on bloggers, George Bush, American anti-intellectualism, TV, free market pressures ... everyone is to blame except themselves. I stopped regularly reading most reviews 20 years ago because the reviwers told me little more than (i) which faddish literary theory the reviwer was committed to with religous zeal, (ii) which academic clique the reviewer belonged to (and the writer did not belong to). The reviews made very clear that the book was/was not postcolonial enough, was/was not Marxist enough, was/was not feminist enough, was/was not poststructuralist enough, or what it might mean if was "deconstructed" in the currently compulsory mode. What the reviews did not tell me about was the book under review. After decades of academically compulsory theoretical fundamentalism, sustained by self-imposed intellectual isolation in academic enclaves, the reviewers have no one to blame but themselves for their irrelevance.