Just to put this in perspective, the review in question has been endlessly debated over at mustrad.co.uk, where it appeared. It did not "make it into print" because it is on a website. This means that not only was it considered reasonable to publish by Rod Stradling, the site's editor, but that Rod continues to think it is a reasonable review, or else he would remove it.

Keep in mind also that an edited version of the review, from which all the positive comments were removed, has made the rounds by email. So unless you've visited the mustrad.org.uk site, you might not have read the whole thing.

Keep in mind, too, that Fred says outright that the book and CD set is "unmissable" despite its shortcomings. The review is hardly a recommendation to avoid buying it!

Keep in mind, finally, that in the first letter to Musical Traditions defending the book against the review, John Moulden wrote: "no-one denies that the book has deficiencies. I, personally, would like to know why Dáibhí ignored or selected, some information and advice I offered him and whose inclusion would (I think) have made a better balanced and more accurate book. And there are numerous unexplained editorial inconsistencies - one of them very serious." It seems to me that even the book's defenders agree with Fred that it should have been better.

As a reviewer myself, I can see where Fred is coming from. Often when we read a book that has many, many mistakes, we begin to catalog them for ourselves, as a way of verifying: is this really worse than most books, or am I being unfair? Once that list of mistakes is made, it is tempting to mention a lot of them in the review. By any account, there are a lot of blunders in this book.

Furthermore, one of the most serious errors was that in many cases the transcription of the song in the book did not match the recording on the CD, even though it states in the book that the same performance on the CD was transcribed for the book. By mistake, and through circumstances he will not fully reveal, citing libel laws (!), Dr. O Croinin in these cases transcribed a different tape of Mrs. Cronin singing the same song. Fred had no way of knowing this, as even O Croinin was not aware the error was being made. This cast a huge doubt in Fred's mind as to whether the transcriptions were incompetent work, or whether they were conflated texts from several versions, etc.

O Croinin himself realized this was a legitimate issue, and wrote to the magazine:

"This is all very unsatisfactory I know, and your reviewer can hardly be blamed for working himself into a frenzy about the apparent disparity between texts and CDs."

Once a book creates a doubt of this magnitude, and is further riddled with numerous small errors of fact, it becomes in essence useless to the critical reader, who no longer knows whether he can trust the author. Even if the book has a lot of good information in it, the reader will not trust that information—so what's the point of reading it? Now that we know what O Croinin's error was, a large part of the doubt disappears, and we can see the small errors of fact for what they are. Consequently, we can assume O Croinin is more or less accurate a good deal of the time, and the book ceases to be useless. But Fred was writing from a point of view of understandable frustration.

Finally, keep in mind that Fred's review has pointed out many of the issues that need to be corrected for a second edition, and as such has done a very valuable service. For the publisher to cite this as a reason not to publish a corrected and expanded edition is disingenuous—indeed, that is the only way for the publisher to address and correct the errors of the first edition.

In short, even if you think Fred went overboard, try to be forgiving about it. It's likely that the second edition, if it is published, will be much better thanks to him.