Robert Rosen

Fortunately, I’m not the only person who’s been wondering why, up to a few days ago, no reader reviews of Beaver Street had appeared on Amazon UK, where the book is readily available.

David Comfort, author of The Rock & Roll Book of the Dead, and a professional critic, looked into the matter after he submitted a review to Amazon UK—similar to his review that ran on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website—which was not posted. He wrote to Amazon to ask what was going on and received the following response:

Hello Mr. Comfort,
We encourage all feedback on the Amazon.co.uk website, both positive and negative.
However, it has come to our attention that your review of “Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography” does not comply with our customer reviews guidelines as:
We don’t allow obscene or distasteful content including sexually explicit or sexually gratuitous comments in Customer Reviews.
It is focused on the author and their life rather than reviewing the book itself.

Comfort then sent the following letter to Amazon UK:

Amazon UK Editors:
Are you still in the Victorian Age, or the 21st Century? If the latter, you should find nothing sexually explicit or gratuitous in my review of “Beaver Street.” Please point out the four letter words.
As for your objection that the piece is focused on the author, not the book itself—if you READ the book, rather than blindly pontificate, you will discover that it is AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL and all about the author and his experiences.
If you fancy yourselves as a moral police—not a Free Speech protective bookseller as your customers imagine—please let us know so we can take our business and reviews elsewhere.
David Comfort

The result: Comfort’s review was read by a human, rather than scanned by a computer for objectionable language, and posted exactly as he’d originally written it.

So, a word of warning to future readers of Beaver Street who will be submitting reviews to Amazon UK: Be careful with your language. Read the Amazon customer review guidelines. And if you submit a review that’s not posted, then write to Amazon to find out why. You may get an Amazon human to read it and post it.

Tomorrow: David Comfort corresponds with the good people at Amazon US.

It has come to my attention that the amusing little anecdote I wrote about my neighbor, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which was published yesterday in the New York Times “Metropolitan Diary,” has come to the attention of the Supreme Court of the United States. Somebody from the court Googled me, and ended up on the home page of this website. Perhaps they were surprised to learn that this innocent New York City street scene was written by a guy who wrote a book about pornography. Perhaps it was Justice Sotomayor herself or one of her clerks who did the Googling. Well, if that’s the case, allow me to offer Justice Sotomayor a neighborly hello. And since she’s writing her own memoir, perhaps she’d like to check out my investigative memoir, Beaver Street. There’s quite a bit in the book about the limits of the First Amendment, criminal justice, and certain Supreme Court decisions. I dare say that Justice Sotomayor and her colleagues would find the book enlightening. And who knows, I may be standing before the Supreme Court someday, facing obscenity charges. Allow me to be the first to say that Beaver Street contains much in the way of redeeming social value.