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Author’s wife admits trashing her husband’s rivals in anonymous Amazon reviews

There’s a reason why Amazon’s anonymous reviews are not considered entirely trustworthy. Case in point: last week’s farrago surrounding a series of reviews written by an Amazon reviewer using the pseudonym “Historian.” According to an article in the Guardian, Dr. Rachel Polonsky of Cambridge University discovered a negative review of her otherwise universally lauded  Molotov’s Magic Lantern on Amazon. Polonsky went on a cyber-detective hunt, tracking back earlier reviews written by Historian, and discovering in the process a number of negative reviews directed toward British academics, including Oxford’s Dr. Robert Service. Significantly, Historian singled out one person “ Dr. Orlando Figes “ for praise. (Equally significantly, Polonsky had written a negative review of Figes’s 2002 book, Natasha’s Dance, in the Times Literary Supplement.)

Service responded to Polonsky’s discovery by sending a furious e-mail decrying the practice of anonymous, ad hominem reviews on sites like Amazon to 30 British academics, including Figes. Figes replied to all of Service’s correspondents, insisting that he was in no way responsible for the vitriolic reviews, which could have been written “by virtually anyone.”

However, last Friday, a note from Figes’s lawyer unmasked the actual author of the reviews, Dr. Stephanie Palmer, a lecturer at Cambridge. Palmer is also Figes’s wife.

In the pantheon of conflict-of-interest scandals, this one makes 2006’s Ryan Bigge/Leah McLaren contretemps seem like small beer. Writing in The Independent, Philip Hensher makes a salient point about anonymous book reviews online:

With the internet have come huge opportunities for anonymity. Anyone can say what they like about anyone else without there being the slightest risk of an interest, a direct connection, or an obligation being uncovered. That doesn’t seem an advantage, on the whole. I can see the reason for Salam Pax, the famous gay Iraqi blogger, to write pseudonymously. What possibly justification [sic] can there be for a blog of book reviews, or the reviews on Amazon, to remain anonymous, unless to conceal improper interests?

Historian’s reviews have been taken down, but Hensher’s point remains.

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April 19th, 2010

11:36 am

Category: Book news

Tagged with: Philip Hensher