Critics of a book by controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson have pointed out that their reviews were selectively and misleadingly quoted as blurbs, the BBC reports.
Blurbs on the cover of a paperback edition of Peterson’s book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, published in 2021 by Random House Canada, made it sound like the reviewers had praised the book—but that wasn’t the case, the critics say.
Johanna Thomas-Corr reviewed the book for the New Statesman in 2021 and wrote that it was “a lumpy soup of bromides” that “reads more like a compendium of stodgy Sunday sermons delivered by a fire-and-brimstone preacher than a conventional self-help manual or political polemic.”
Thomas-Corr also called the book “genuinely enlightening and often poignant,” which ended up as part of the blurb. On X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Thomas-Corr wrote, “The quote on the back of Jordan Peterson’s paperback is a gross misrepresentation of my 2,000+ word New Statesman review of his book. It should be removed.”
Another critic, James Marriott, reviewed the book for the British newspaper the Times and described Peterson’s philosophy as “bonkers,” slamming his writing as “repetitious, unvariegated, rhythmless, opaque, and possessed of a suffocating sense of its own importance.”
Marriott’s blurb on the book? "A philosophy of the meaning of life ... the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written." The latter phrase referred to a single chapter in the book.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
