The review I've been waiting for

It matters when someone correctly spots the intent of your work

Putting a book out there for feedback is an excruciating process. You’ve poured your heart and soul into something. It has dominated your life for a couple two-three years. You’ve balanced the need for acceptance with your own sense of this is what needs to be said! You work the text to death, desperately trying to eliminate every possible grammatical miscue. It is simply hard to put down the brush because you can’t help thinking that the next stroke will be crucial.

And then it’s out there and beyond your control. All you notice are the slights or the pigeon-holing of the material or — worse — you. Your instinct is to take on all comers, which is not smart. The smart thing is to run to wherever there’s a breakthrough and don’t sweat the closed doors because they can always be opened later.

Deep down, what you crave is what everyone craves all the time: to be understood as to understand. You want that connection, that clear sense from the reader or reviewer that they get what you’re trying to do here.

So I got that review recently published in the Homeland Security Affairs Journal, which I greatly appreciate because I have published there in the past (piece on Customs & Border Protection that eventually went into a book put together by scholars connected with the journal).

I don’t know the reviewer, and he obviously comes from a position of viewing my work favorably in the past (always helpful). The compliments are nice but what really stokes me is his working out of my intent, combined with critiques of that approach. That feels like being understood as a creator, and that’s very gratifying.

So here’s the complete review (the guy put in some serious effort) with my running commentary sprinkled throughout. Hope it works for you; it was cathartic for me.

Oh, and for non-subscribers, find the whole review here.

Daniel O’Connor reviews America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse by Thomas Barnett (Penguin/Random House, 2023)

First off, I am taken aback by the notation suggesting that the book was published by Penguin/Random House because it wasn’t. Not a criticism of the review. How would they know? BenBella is the publisher and the distributor is Penguin/Random. So, it’s sort of like a Plan B film production distributed by Universal. Our’s is most definitely an “indie film,” which has been a challenge on getting visibility. Not a small thing to note for this author. We made a choice to go “indie” because BenBella was willing to let us do our thing, design-wise and visually, and that was crucial to getting the book we all wanted at Throughline. We took the harder path to get the better product.