Nerd News: Historian Smackdown Over Trotsky

Read this.  No, really!  You've never had this much fun reading about Trotsky.  Here's a piece of the furious kerfuffle over a recent academic monograph/biography (my emphasis in boldface):

But the new issue of The American Historical Review contains a notice that will earn a place in the annals of the scholarly take-down. One historian says of another that he “commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question." Its publisher (one of the most prominent university presses in the United States) “has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship." 

And plenty more where that came from. Since reading the review last week, I have been in touch with both the reviewer and the review-ee -- then spent a week trying to elicit a comment from the pertinent acquisitions editor at the press, who has gone either on vacation or into hiding.

The volume in question is Trotsky: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2009) by Robert Service, a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford.  Harvard and Oxford, eh?  Well, having a fancy name and snooty credentials doesn't mean a darn thing if you haven't got basic competence.  An academic credential or reputation is just a stupid label that increasingly is no indication of actual substance.