Gail Pool

Gail Pool is an American writer and critic, whose work has focused on books, the culture of magazines, and travel.

Early life and education Pool was born in New York City, where she attended Little Red School House and Hunter College High School. She concentrated in Greek and Latin at Harvard University, graduating in 1967. In 1966, Gail married Harvard classmate, Jeremy Pool, and in 1969-70, for Jeremy's fieldwork in anthropology at the London School of Economics, the couple spent sixteen months (1969–70) living with the Baining of New Britain, in what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Pool wrote about this powerful experience for the New York Times, and in her book, Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork (University of Missouri Press, 2015). Pool has lived in San Francisco, where she received an MA in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she received an MLS at Simmons School of Library and Information Science and was elected to the board of trustees at the Brookline Public Library. She and her husband now live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend winters in Sanibel, Florida. She has one son.

Work In 1976, Pool became editor of Boston Review, then a newly founded arts magazine called New Boston Review. She left in 1980, passing the publication on to Arthur J. Rosenthal, director of the Harvard University Press, and for the next decade wrote about the culture and business of magazines, writing a column in Wilson Library Bulletin, and articles in such publications as Columbia Journalism Review, Massachusetts Review, and the Radcliffe Quarterly. As a book critic in the 1980s and 1990s, Pool wrote a travel literature column for the Christian Science Monitor, and a fiction column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer that also appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Houston Post. She reviewed for many publications, including the New York Times, was a regular contributor to the Women’s Review of Books, and for many years was books editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly. In two essays she wrote during this time—"Inside Book Reviewing," which appeared in Boston Review and “Too Many Reviews of Scholarly Books are Puffy, Nasty, or Poorly Written,” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education—she developed her critique of reviewing that led to her book, Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Pool taught writing at Emmanuel College and at the Radcliffe Seminars.