My review of that bad book is posted here. Regime change at TER was good for me.
Update: Having looked at the review more closely, I saw that the formatting doesn’t allow for footnotes, which meant that I couldn’t acknowledge my indebtedness to Mary P. Nichols, who generously read many drafts, and other friends (who probably don’t want their names associated with this) who saved me from some stupidities.
Update #2: Win Myers, ever the industrious and accommodating editor, has worked the footnotes back in. New levels of meaning will be revealed to the careful and discerning readers. Be sure to count backwards.
Your review accords with what appeared in Foreign Affairs. But it reminds me of a story about another awful academic book from a couple of decades ago. I was speaking to an eminent scholar at a conference when he told me that the particular tome in question -- which I knew to be full of inaccuracies and misinterpretations -- was "a seminal book."
I was stunned to hear this, but then the scholar quickly added: "The book was so bad that it compelled five good scholars to write books on the same subject."So perhaps Nortons book will prove to be similarly "seminal."