STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with praise of criticism. There's a new award for brutal book reviews in Britain: a Hatchet Job of the Year Award. A Julian Barnes book is dismissed as just so average. A biography of Martin Amis is called spectacularly bad writing about spectacularly good writing. Reviewer Camilla Long called a book a pointlessly explicit, infuriatingly naive and at times plain off-putting slither through a series of unedited slurpings. It's MORNING EDITION.