The most awful thing I've read recently

This, in a New York Times book review by Janet Maslin, is one of the most terrifying passages I have ever read: "Ms. Gershow has been a teacher at the University of Oregon, where some students’ online ratings of her sound like a continuation of Lydia’s high school nightmare. Being regarded as neither popular nor hot seems to be territory that Ms. Gershow knows well, maybe in the classroom and certainly on the pages of her unusually credible and precise novel."

This is so awful. Obviously, Maslin must have googled Gershow (ratemyprofessors is the fifth hit right now) and just plucked out what she found without thinking much about it. Equally obviously, Maslin can't have ever been on the receiving end of student evaluations, or she would have more sensitivity to their unreliability and, more importantly, to their essentially private nature, which is what makes online ratings so uncomfortable and makes decent people stay away from or at least not discuss other people's.

I just keep imagining what should be a wonderful moment in the life of a young novelist--her first book, favorably reviewed in the New York Times!--marred by a gratuitous and humiliating invasion of privacy, the decision to trumpet to the world that the author's students didn't like her AND (this is where Maslin is really in poor taste) didn't think she was hot. (The students, judging from the author photo, are totally mistaken--but the fact that I immediately scrolled up the page to look at the author photo illustrates exactly what is the problem here.)

Students should be more sensitive when they are tempted to post mean things online and, of course, that words have consequences is part of what we try to teach them. But there's no excuse for professional book reviewers.