Why start a review, rather than something else?
By Elizabeth Stice, Editor-in-Chief
In recent weeks, a fairly well-known writer in conservative and religious circles was found out to be a fraud and have a criminal past. Before people caught on to his fictional degree, he had written for a number of publications and had quite a platform. The whole thing is most embarrassing for him, but it is also somewhat embarrassing for everyone who published him. It would be unusual for every website and magazine to ask for academic transcripts from contributors, but it still doesn’t look good. Many people probably regret some of their retweets.
I humbly suspect that this kind of thing is less common with a website like Orange Blossom Ordinary, not because of any radical level of discernment on the part of our editors, but simply because it is a review. The nature of a review is to keep the focus on books and ideas and other authors. To review a book well, you have to put yourself second. You have to read (probably hundreds of) pages that someone else wrote. You have to honestly consider the words and ideas of someone else. You must write a review that is about what was written, not what you wish that author had written. And then you must accept editing.
One way of understanding Orange Blossom Ordinary is by considering what it isn’t. It is not a battle site for the culture wars. It is not a forum for personal opinions at all. It offers little in the way of personal promotion and probably nothing in the way of professional promotion. It is highly unlikely in this day and age that anyone will make a name for themselves by reviewing books, here or elsewhere. Orange Blossom Ordinary isn’t the kind of website you’d be desperate to write for if you were desperate to have a platform.
Orange Blossom Ordinary is, and always will be, imperfect, but it is not much of a refuge for fakery. We welcome good readers and writers of all kinds. A falsified degree would convey no advantage to a contributor. Yes, someone could submit an entirely falsified review, maybe AI-generated, but I consider it unlikely that someone who had no interest in reading a book would submit a fake review of one. You might reference a book you hadn’t read in an opinion piece, but what would be the point of writing an entire review for a book you hadn’t read? If that was your agenda, you’d probably take it elsewhere.
What is a review? Who can find it a refuge? It is a place for contributors who care about books and ideas. It is a place for contributors who can put someone else’s ideas at the center of their writing, rather than their own ideas and opinions. It is a place for readers who want to know more about the world around us, past and present. It is a place for people who want more than talking points. Why start a review, rather than something else? Its nature and the people it naturally attracts explain why it is a worthwhile enterprise.
