"It may seem ungenerous to criticize a book for not giving us more when it offers so many cogent and persuasively argued interpretations. Indeed, there is something inherently unreasonable about the expectation, so pervasive in the current “professionalized” model that most humanities departments cultivate (perhaps at their own peril): viz., that even a first book must showcase its author’s range across disciplines, while arguing a sharp and provocative thesis. No longer, it seems, is a first book allowed to be the more specialized, cautious, and well-grounded step in a single sub-field—e.g., the study of a single author and/or carefully delimited issue—that had long been the norm. Thus there no longer appear to be any limits to the amount of secondary literature for which the writer...now bears (at least implicit) responsibility."
--Thomas Pfau, reviewing Colin Jager's The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era
