Professional book reviewers are an endangered species—but not at the Washington Monthly.

The* Monthly*’s Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing is the nation’s only journalism prize dedicated to highlighting and encouraging exemplary reviews of serious, public affairs-focused books. Now in its sixth year, the award honors the memory of Kukula Kapoor Glastris, the magazine’s longtime and beloved books editor.

In this episode of the *Monthly *podcast, Senior Editor Anne Kim speaks with Christoph Irmscher, winner of the 2025 Kukula Award in the smaller publications category. Irmscher won for his sensitive and timely review of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press), published in the online journal Counterpunch. Irmscher is a Distinguished Professor in English at Indiana University in Bloomington, the author of several books, and a regular contributor of book reviews to the Wall Street Journal.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.

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**Anne Kim: **

Welcome, Christoph, and congratulations!

You wrote about Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. It’s the sequel of sorts to her first book, Strangers in their Own Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was widely viewed as one of the best scholarly works out there to explain the rise of the right.

Why did you choose to review Stolen Pride, and what were you hoping to achieve by writing a review?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

I came across it by accident, seeing it in a catalog. And after reading about Stolen Pride, it seemed imperative to me that this was something that needed to be written about. I did not submit my review to one of the venues I usually work for because I wanted to be free to write what I liked about this book, and it seemed really important to me not to be constrained by word limit or considerations of audience.

When I started reading it, it pretty much confirmed what I thought it would be—a book that’s very much for our current moment that talks about the political divide and what can be done about it.

What had impressed me about *Strangers in Their Own Land *is Arlie Hochschild’s generosity. She talks about something she calls the “empathy bridge” that we need to build between sides that seem irreconcilable when you first look at them. It seemed to me a very attractive idea. I was surrounded by so much division and so much anger as well. And for my own sake, I needed to find something that would help me think about what was happening differently.

The very notion of this Berkeley professor walking into communities in Kentucky, which is not far from where I teach, and trying to find a basis for conversations seemed really appealing to me. The other reason I wanted to write about this book it is that she has a very unique style. It’s academic—so you will find end notes, you will find documentation, you will find evidence. But she also has a very strong narrative tendency, and she knows how to tell a story well and over many pages.

She also has a sense for language. It is not overtly literary in the sense that she’s reaching for effects that are extraneous to what she wants to do. But she has a grasp of words that allows her to say the things she wants to say in the simplest possible way, but also in a way that’s often very beautiful.

**Anne Kim: **

Did she succeed in building the “empathy bridge” for you? What did you learn about the rise of the right and people who are within the MAGA fold that you didn’t know before, especially after reading her first book?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

The book is organized by delving into the stories of different people with a kind of care that I would say is even stronger than in the first book. It’s a book that requires you to keep reading. You can’t just dip into it because it wouldn’t make sense to you. You have to be part of the story that she takes you into. And I think “patience” is probably the word that comes to mind, both to hear people out and also to hear yourself out as you are reading the book—to listen to your own responses and to recognize your own moments of impatience and anger. And there are definitely moments in these stories where you’re allowed to say, “OK, this is something that I just can’t agree with and I have to remove myself. There’s no common ground in this particular regard.”

But then there might be something else that you can latch onto. For me, one of the takeaways, and this is how I ended my review, is the notion that education is important but not something that is equitably available to people in these communities. She makes a very strong point as to what education can do for some of the people that she’s met, and the irony to me is right now is that these educational opportunities are being cut, defunded, or diminished in ways that work against the people who need these opportunities to be made available to them.

**Anne Kim: **

How did you interpret the title of her book, Stolen Pride? And how do you connect that to polarization that you’ve been observing and the current moment that we’re in?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

That’s an interesting question because “stolen” raises the question of who’s doing the stealing.

The answer in the book is twofold, or maybe even threefold. On the one hand, there’s a very definite sense that things are being taken away from these people. And that has to do with the power of the urban centers, as she puts it, with opportunities being taken away from certain areas of the country. There is some stealing that’s being done by politicians who steal the narratives of these people and appropriate them for themselves in ways that, as the book makes very clear, are not at all responsible. The third kind of stealing is the stealing that you do to yourself by remaining in the situation that you’re in, by depriving yourself of opportunities.

And “pride,” as a word, is something that is complicated. I would describe Arlie’s approach to her subject as humility, actually, because she walks into these situations, into these narratives, into these dialogues, these conversations, not as a proud person, not as somebody who really exists on her privilege, but tries to check it at the door.

But she’s also implying that the people she speaks to are entitled to being proud of who they are, because they’ve been told for many, many years that being who they are is nothing to be proud of. I see this when I teach my students who come from the more rural parts of Indiana. They arrive here at school feeling in many, many ways that they are at a disadvantage. They’re not coming from privilege. They’re not coming from families where parents have time to take them for violin lessons or games on weekends. And they feel that they are arriving in a condition that doesn’t allow them equitable access to educational opportunities.

**Anne Kim: **

I want to turn to the importance of reviews, especially in light of two countervailing trends. On the one hand, there’s more and more content all the time. According to UNESCO, there are more than 2 million books published every year. On the other hand, Americans are reading fewer books. The National Endowment for the Arts says that just 48 percent of Americans read at least one book last year, compared to 55 percent ten years ago. Given what’s happened with reading, with publishing, with content, how do you see the function of book reviews and why do we need them?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

That’s a very interesting and complex question. I started reviewing books because of other book reviews I read and loved. I felt there was something about the art form that was just really beautiful, to use a limited space to broker a connection between the book and the readers out there for a book that you felt should be read.

I approach reviewing from the premise that somebody has put work into a book that I need to recognize and appreciate. I walk into this understanding that the author is more important than I am. My function is that of a mediator, which also means that I should not try to attract too much attention to myself.

Book reviews are essentially a story about my reading experience. I am not somebody who skims books that I review, even if this means I have to put more time in it. I read every book twice at least, and I make excerpts from it before I take notes. I actually write down excerpts by hand because once you copy a sentence, you actually get a feel for the author’s writing. You get a feeling for the rhythm of the prose. It becomes a visceral experience and a way of merging with what the book is doing.

I’m generally somebody who probably is on the side of wanting to be favorable about a book. I do not enjoy pans and I’ve written very few.

**Anne Kim: **

Unfortunately, a lot of outlets are ending book reviews. The Associated Press, for instance, recently announced that it would no longer publish reviews, though it would cover the publishing industry. Give us your defense of book reviews. What are we losing if we don’t have reviewers?

Christoph Irmscher:

I occasionally write for the Wall Street Journal, and I was trained by someone I admire to this day, Chris Carduff, who was in charge of the book review and who passed away two years ago.

Chris thought of the weekend book review section as a conversation—as a sort of symphony of voices that he was arranging very, very carefully. And there was nothing accidental to it. He came to one of my book reviewing classes, and he made my students read several weekend sections and then asked them what they thought. What emerged was really interesting to see how he had thought of these different voices talking to each other, which might not be obvious to somebody who just opens the section and reads through it. But it became clear to my students that there was really something very important that was happening. It was a cultural conversation.

One of my students asked critically about a review that came from the very conservative end of the spectrum and made a couple of points that all my students disagreed with. And Chris said something very remarkable. He said the world of culture, the world of reading, and the world of books is so large that there is room for that voice as well—which was a beautiful, nice thing to say.

And I think this notion of a cultural conversation is what we are losing when we cut book reviews.

We cannot exist without writers. We cannot exist without the voices of writers. We cannot exist without books in whatever form, whether you read them in print or in electronic form. They determine the way we think. If they get replaced by video games or by movies or by TikTok scrolling and so forth, it is not the same.

**Anne Kim: **

The internet has cheapened the concept of a review. At the same time, professional reviewers are disappearing, amateur reviewers have hijacked a lot of this conversation that you’re talking about. What is the particular value of the professional critic versus the occasional reader on Goodreads who puts up the three-star review with one paragraph?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

I’ve been impressed as I was learning how to do book reviews just how much time [the critics I admire] put into reviewing. Not just reading the book carefully, but looking at other books by the same writer to understand what this new book is doing. This is work that is not richly compensated at all. And at the end of it all, there might be just the 1,000 word review. It doesn’t show the weeks of work and thinking and the revisions that go into it.

It doesn’t acknowledge the editors, the proofreaders, the fact checkers who work on a review. Sometimes when a review comes out, four, five, six different people have weighed in on it, which is an amazing thing. This is very different from somebody who picks up the book and has a gut reaction to it.

I do not imply that these gut reactions are not valid. They can play a part in the whole system of how a book gets put out and is being read by the people out there. But professional book reviews, if they’re good, live up to a standard that is much, much higher. And that is a service to the book and a service to readers. It is also, if it’s done well, a thing of beauty.

**Anne Kim: **

I want to turn to what the judges for this year’s Kukula Award have said about your review of Stolen Pride. Judge Judy Pasternak wrote that your review “brings insights of his own to a subject that couldn’t be more timely or crucial to the continuation of our democracy.” A second judge, Alan Guelzo, wrote that your review is “incisive without being condescending to the subjects of the book,” and that “Irmscher seemed to be writing from felt pain.”

That kind of empathy is in short supply these days, and you talked about this really intensive process that goes into each review. How did you go about writing this particular review?

**Christoph Irmscher: **

I did some of the things that I usually do. I first read the book without taking notes. I made some marginal notes of passages that I like, but I read the entire book. And I singled out sections that seem particularly important to me.

Sometimes I use Post-it notes, but more often than not, it’s just using a pen. I do not use a pencil because I want things to be recognizable when I return. That’s very important to me. So that’s the first reading. On the second reading, I focus on passages. Again, I read the entire book, but I spend more time on the passages that I’ve singled out as particularly relevant. And then a story emerges for me from these excerpts that I arrange into a narrative.

I don’t type anything. I write it out with a notebook next to me, and I try to combine the passages and try to develop a story around them. With Stolen Pride, one of the things that obviously suggested itself was a panorama of the lives that she unfolds, and there were certain lives I wanted to focus on.

It’s very important, as John Updike says, to give a sense of how the book is made. Quote from the book. Offer passages. Give the book a voice. Don’t suffocate. Don’t smother the book with the things you have to say about it but make sure that the voice of the author is allowed in.

**Anne Kim: **

Well, Thank you, Christoph. This has been like a fascinating insight into how professional reviewers do their craft. It was a pleasure to meet you and congratulations again.

**Christoph Irmscher: **

Thank you again and thanks for spending so much time with me.