Hello Czar, I'll be taking up the review for this nomination and will be presenting it shortly. I hope my feedback will be helpful and I get to learn something new from it. Tayi ArajakateTalk01:01, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Czar, I have completed the review. That was an interesting read, it is pretty well researched and more or less fulfills the good article criteria so I'm going to promote it. But I think the prose can be improved, it is a bit dialect-ish which can be hard to follow sometimes. I've left some criticism and suggestions below, with respect to the section on publication which I think needs improvements in particular. Tayi ArajakateTalk10:10, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! Addressed the below points, save for those with indented comments. Open to feedback on the dialect—not sure if that's referring to the jargon associated with Goodman's niche interests or to my own writing. czar19:11, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Czar, on a second look it's probably the topic although I wouldn't call it niche per se. It's just with words and phrases like "successively traded favor", "bohemian beatniks", "indictment" used outside a legal context, "as well" at the end of a sentence. I am not suggesting any of this needs to be changed, I just re-read the article and think it's actually well written especially after some of the sentences were rephrased, maybe I'm not that used to American English is all. Tayi ArajakateTalk04:06, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
In the section called "Publication", the book is initially called "book" and then shifts to "manuscript" and then to "book" again after publication. I would suggest just keeping it as manuscript before its publication.
"Goodman, in his journals, struggled to name this fight and blamed his own cowardice as blocking his ability to see his own, personal fight to then insert in the story." The sentence can sound confusing, I would suggest rephrasing.
"Also significant, where his prior writing had qualities of hectoring insistence and recklessness, Goodman tried a new style that was powerfully earnest, direct, and patient." This sounds pretty subjective. I think this needs to be attributed, it's also missing a comma.
Might sound subjective but it's uncontroversial, coming from his estate's literary executor. Where is the missing comma?
Nevermind about the comma, I thought hectoring and insistence were supposed to be separate qualities.
"He believed that the cultural issues of conformity and alienation that he described were in truth political issues and so wanted the book's political message to be read in advance of the 1960 presidential campaign." This sentence can sound confusing as well. It could be split into two sentences.
The section talks about Podhoretz encountering an excerpt in Dissent magazine. Is there any information on the circumstances it came to be published in the magazine?
How it came to be published in Dissent? Nothing remarkable that I've seen—I imagine it was the same as any submission process.
Is there more information on Goodman's search for a publisher and how it got rejected by 19 of them? A single line stating it was rejected by 19 of them after the rejection by the sponsor seems a bit incomplete.
Not that I've seen or can recall. Book rejections are common, for what it's worth, and the "19" is more trivia than anything else, to show how publishers were uninterested in the work about to become a best-seller.
"Goodman and Podhoretz extracted three long articles from the manuscript—more than half of its length—for the editor's revised Commentary magazine. Epstein of Random House planned the book's release to follow the serialization." This can sound confusing as well, suggest rephrasing.
The book also appears to have extracts published in a number of other magazines, maybe they should have mentions?
I think the section could be better described as "Development and publication" rather than just "Publication".
Typically book articles include the entire writing process as the "Publication" rather than "Development"
The image of the publisher doesn't align with the passage about him. The caption should also be present in the text and not in the caption.
Image spacing usually takes precedence, in my experience. Our caption guideline doesn't speak to the second point.
I find it a bit odd that the article has an image of the publisher but not of the author.
Well, we don't have a free use photo of the author! :)
Pass