There is a place in readers’ memories, if not on the musty shelf of literature, for an author’s published rebuttal to a harsh review, and this is best evidenced by the widespread and seemingly obvious wisdom on the matter. The poetry critic David Orr has advised, “The best way to respond to a bad review is simple: don’t respond. And if you must respond, don’t type angry.” In a 2006 NPR interview, Erica Jong similarly tells how a brutal review triggers in her a torrent of revenge fantasies, never to be acted on. “Am I cowardly or wise?” she asks herself. “Wise by default. I know that revenge springs back on the avenger.” And Paul Fussell, writing in Harper’s in 1982, paints a grotesque picture of less-restrained writers and the products of their spiteful pens: “Sputtering away, the veins of their foreheads standing out, these little compositions generally deliver the most naked view of the author’s wounded vanity. And never with subtlety, for they are conceived in fury and scribbled in haste.” Fussell even does writers the service of christening the author’s letter of complaint the “A.B.M.—the Author’s Big Mistake.”

And yet. Here is Richard Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who last August read the review of his book, Seizing Destiny, in The New York Times Book Review, which wound its way to this conclusion: “Kluger’s writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read…. If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After six hundred, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum banged on by a clown.’’ Two weeks later, the Times printed Kluger’s 550-word reply:

Here at last, I appreciatively recognized, was a critic astute and forthright enough to do for me...

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