To browse Academia. Here are all the recensions and reviews I signed for the e-journal Cercles at Rouen University, France, over the years. They are all in English, except two that are in French. The editors of the journal published it at first. Then they censored it. They checked the review I had published on Amazon. Then they excluded me from the team of readers and reviewers. I had to ask why they did not send me books any more and even insist a second time to finally get that explanation.
They did not like my review. They disagreed with it. I had been critical against one top member of their institution. So they negated my freedom of speech in the name of their editing freedom. You will find all these reviews are critical. I have systematically published them on Amazon. Nowadays such reviews can go up to 5, words.
I was obliged to shorten a couple of them, but here you have the complete reviews. Let me tell you I do not regret one single word written in these reviews. But without full freedom of expression it is nothing. That means the reviewer has to take into account in no way at all who the author of the book he is reviewing is, neither his institutional echelon, his race, his color, his sex, his gender, his religion, his national origin, his ethnic origin, his political affiliation, and whatever you may think of.
When tenure and promotion decisions are made, the authors of book reviews often receive little or no credit for their work. For us, this raises four important issues. First, how can faculty members enhance their own and as well as their students' knowledge without critically analyzing the most recent ideas published in books?
Second, although faculty members rely on book reviews for making decisions about which texts to adopt for their courses, they have no incentive for sharing their own reviews with their colleagues. Third, although publishing scholarly books is highly regarded in most academic institutions, reviewing these books is not.
