New York Times Book Review leads: The good, the bad, and the ugly #3
Are Times editors afraid to edit? You might wonder after reading the latest 7 winners and sinners in my series about their book-review openers
Why is it so hard to write a good opener for a book review? All you need to do is to have something to say about a book or its author or topic. Then you say it in a line or two of clear and correct English that makes people want to read more. If you have nothing to say, you can quote the best line in the book or the smartest thing you’ve read about the author and use it a springboard for the rest of the review.
As easy as this should be, New York Times book reviewers keep failing at it. That’s especially true of its staff critics and editors. You can still read smart, well-written openers in the New York Times Book Review when it assigns books to freelancers with more expertise or higher standards, such as recent contributors Robert Pinsky, Laura Miller, and Christian Lorentzen.
But staff-written leads tend to be dull, off the point, infested with clichés, or so egocentric, they tell you more about the critic than the book at hand. Often their authors seem not to have mastered a point of English grammar or punctuation, such as the use of the exclamation point.
Yet another embarrassment to the Times turned up last weekend, a few days after I’d written about the misuses of the exclamation point by its staff. It came from MJ Walker, an editor of the book review, and you’ll find it a dissection of its failures below. As always in this occasional series, the good leads appear above the paywall and the bad and the ugly below it.
The good
“Novelists send their characters abroad for the same reason we send ourselves: for a change of pace, to get out of a rut, to shake off the rust.”
Charles McGrath, the editor of the NYTBR from 1995 to 2004, in the Bookends column, “Why Do So Many American Authors Send Their Characters Abroad?,” Aug. 7, 2016
Why it’s good: McGrath’s lead gets right to the point of what his column is about: why American novelists set their stories in other countries. It’s about not about him—it’s about the books in his column. It’s also interesting, unafraid to express an opinion, and well written, with a nice rhythm and a vivid image at the end (“to shake off the rust”). You’d have learned something from this lead even if you read no more of the review.
“Hundreds of thousands of restaurants closed during Covid, and the ensuing rent and labor costs have left the industry still thrashing.”
Corby Kummer, a freelance critic, in a review of the memoir I’m Not Trying to Be Difficult by Drew Nieporent with Jamie Feldmar, Nov. 30, 2025
Why it’s good: Leads with a statistic can be soporific. They need to be surprising to keep people reading, and this one is. How many restaurants would you have guessed closed during the pandemic? You might have said “thousands.” But “hundreds of thousands”? Probably not. Corby Kummer’s conversational tone helps, too. This lead would have been dull if Kummer had given a precise figure and a source in a line such as, “According to the National Restaurant Association, more than 110,000 eating and drinking establishments closed in the U.S. alone during the pandemic.”