De Botton flames NY Times reviewer

The London-based writer and philosopher Alain de Botton has launched an internet offensive against a critic who gave him a bad review. "I will hate you till the day I die," the 39-year-old author told Caleb Crain who had given a less-than-dazzling evaluation of his latest book  The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work in the New York Times.

He accused Crain of being "driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the US, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900-word review."
 
Crain's offending review contained references to what he saw as "mean-spiritedness", "superficial judgment" and "spite" in the book. "De Botton starts with noble intentions," he wrote, "but there is a note of condescension. By chapter three de Botton has already lost track of his initial goal."

Swiss-born de Botton made his angry riposte in the form of a comment posted on Crain's blog, Steamboats are Ruining Everything. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph about the ensuing literary gossip, de Botton said: "It was a private communication to his website, to him as a blogger. It's appalling that it seems that I'm telling the world."

De Botton's outburst comes hot on the heels of writer Alice Hoffman's tongue-lashing of another critic, the Boston Globe's Roberta Silman. Hoffman is reputed to have written 27 angry tweets, including one that invited fellow tweeters to strike back at "snarky critics" after she read a poor review of her latest book The Story Sisters. Hoffman has since apologised and removed her Twitter account. ·