Thoughts on sloppy reviewers

I had dinner last night with a well-known author who made the excellent point that people who review your book don't always read it. It's been something that's bothered me for a while, ever since The Economist ran a mini-review of my book back in January, apparently WITHOUT EVER HAVING READ THE BOOK. If they had a copy of the book, they had to have stolen it, because neither I nor my publisher, Penguin, gave anyone at The Economist a pre-publication copy. Another pet peeve this author mentioned is that people who review your book sometimes SKIM it. This unfortunately seems to have been the problem with Le-Min Lim over at Bloomberg, who notes that I have neglected to mention the "hub effect" in Guangdong province. It's a shame she failed to read my discussion of the "hub effect", also known as the "cluster effect" on pages 9-10, 251, 280-81, and 282. Read these sloppy reviews and other more thorough ones in the Reviews section on the right.