Rachel Donadio had an entertaining essay in Sunday’s NYT Book Review on blurbing. It’s a fine art, she says: "Blurb too often, or include too many blurbs on your book, and you might get called a blurb whore."
Well. I have in front of me The World is Curved, a new book by David Smick.
On the front cover is a blurb from Alan Greenspan. On the back cover is a longer blurb from Alan Greenspan, as well as blurbs from Larry Summers, Barton Biggs, Bill Bradley, George Schultz, Jean-Claude Trichet, and Lawrence Eagleburger.
But wait! That’s not all! Open it up, and the first thing you find — before even the title page — is five more pages of blurbs, from Stan Druckenmiller, Jagdish Bhagwati, Jeffrey Garten, Robert Hormats, Frank Carlucci, William Seidman, Lee Hamilton, Karl Otto Pöhl, Carla Hills, Louis Bacon, Glenn Hubbard, AW Clausen, Yochi Funabashi, James Schlesinger, John Taylor, Hans Tietmeyer, Murray Weidenbaum, Peter Kenen, Otmar Issing, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Ted Truman, Gary Clude Hufbauer, Michael Boskin, Allan Meltzer, Michael Steinhardt, Peter Fisher, John Williamson, William Kristol, Benjamin Friedman, Richard Clarida, Norbert Walter, Ron Insana, Horst Siebert, Renato Ruggiero, Charles Dallara, and Nigel Lawson.
And yes, there’s more still on the website.
Having slogged my way through the first couple of chapters, I think I can pretty safely say that none of these people has actually read the book all the way through. Here’s a passage taken more or less at random:
The financial markets, as I started my consulting business in the mid-1980s, had become a global cauldron of uncertainty. Under globalization, many of the tried-and-true rules of economics and financial trading suddenly no longer applied. No econometric model — no magical black box of economic formulas — was useful anymore in predicting the future. Financial liberalization had created an ocean of liquidity that was sloshing all over the economic and financial rulebooks. Success required, more than ever, operating creatively from gut instinct.
Once you cut through the mixed metaphors and the hyperbole, what you’re left with is silly and unhelpful.
Smick is a smart chap — as he takes great pains to show us on a regular basis with anecdotes of him regaling the rich and powerful with his analysis — and occasionally, buried in the turgid prose, one finds something genuinely insightful. What’s more, if you read what Smick has written in the past, it’s generally clear and lucid.
So I’m not sure what’s happened here; I suspect that it’s a combination of Smick overcompensating for the fact that he’s writing for a broader audience than he’s used to, along with a desire on his part not to give away too much of the analysis for which he charges his clients so much money.
But from a consumer perspective, it’s quite clear that blurbs are not to be trusted. Especially not when they’re as numerous as this.