did get it

Someone did send me the Goffey review of Prince of Networks, but thanks to those who have continued to offer to send it.

One of the really unpleasant surprises of authoring books, at least one’s earliest books, is how few reviews they tend to get. Book reviewing is a bit of a faded art compared with yesteryear.

The very long silence following the appearance of Tool-Being was deafening, and I feared the book had fallen through the cracks of the world. But no, it just took a couple of years for people to absorb it. I think all of the reviews took nearly two years to appear, other than the typically quick one in Choice, which librarians use as ordering advice (the reviews are just one paragraph long).

There was a positive review by Shawn Smith in Tekhne, and a negative one by Marcia-Anne Dobres in whatever journal that was (my one bone to pick with Dobres is that she used quotation marks, without a page number, to quote me as saying something I don’t believe I ever said– when you quote an author, especially negatively, it’s only fair play to give a page number). And then came my exchange with Tim Hyde in Philosophy Today, which was a lot of fun.

A few years after that, in the space of a single review, Tony Fry carpet-bombed all of my books, some of Latour’s, some of Noortje Marres’s work, and even the work of Peter-Paul Verbeek, who at the time was a member of Fry’s own editorial board. Don’t mess with Tony Fry.