It’s hard to explain just how much power Michiko Kakutani once seemed to have in publishing. The New York Times’ book critic from 1983 to 2017, Kakutani weighed in on every important novel, memoir, and nonfiction book, speaking with the institutional authority of the world’s most important newspaper. For most of her career there was no Goodreads, no BookTok, no Amazon. For the Manhattan-centric publishing industry, Kakutani’s was the voice that rang the loudest.
A Times reporter elevated to the critic’s chair at 28, she often seemed to approach the job of book reviewing as a reportorial one: She took great notes, she assembled them smartly, and she moved on to the next story. Kakutani did seem to take seriously the reviewer’s role as consumer guide. “My job as a critic was to give honest evaluations of new books and to try to explain why I thought they were worth reading—or not,” she said after she left the paper. She didn’t shy away from the question that some critics find oversimplified, or even demeaning: Well, was it good?
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