Temple Grandin and the Reviewers

Temple Grandin is a celebrity. She is also a high-functioning autistic, a woman with impressive academic qualifications. BBC TV devoted a Horizon programme to the work she has done in making American slaughter houses less stressful to the animals. She has a unique understanding of those we rear for food and this she attributes to the way she thinks in pictures rather than words.

Recently I visited the BBC Worldservice archive of interviews, listened to an interview with her and was moved to buy one of her books. There isn't a good book shop in the vicinity so I visited Amazon. co.uk and clicked on the reviews of Animals in Translation. There were a total of 18 reviewers who awarded it stars as follows:

72% 5 stars

22% 4 stars

6% 1 star

The person who grudgingly gave it a single star did so on the grounds that the book was "essentially a self-help book for abattoir owners". Obviously this was a book worth buying. I am about half way through it and hope to write a review when I have finished. In the meantime, reading the book has made me think again about book reviews and the people who write them.

I decided to look at the reviews of this book on Amazon.com and discovered there were 187 0f them. There was a greater spread of reactions, but, amazingly, around the same percentage of people awarded it 5 stars and 1 star. Here are the percentages:

71% 5 star

14% 4 star

6% 3 star

3% 2 star

6% 1 star

I didn't read all the reviews, but I found that many of those that were critical were among the most thoughtful. It was also obvious that many people write reviews when they have very little, or nothing to add to what has been said before. It's as if they simply want to register a vote, usually in favour of what they have read. I am almost certain that many of the most effusive reviewers were influenced by Temple Grandin's celebrity and by her academic qualifications and felt they had to accept everything she and her co-author, Catherine Johnson, wrote. It takes a very confident person to question the famous, but if the feedback celebrities receive is always unjustifiably positive they can end up less connected to reality than the average person.