Willy: yes, I was thinking more just of the Mopologists being mean, unpleasant, etc., but I think what you posted is in keeping with what Calmoriah was asking for on her thread. Though, given the fact that they apparently revised the list, maybe this is an example of a positive? (Or was your wife bothered by the second list, too?)
In any case, back to the FARMS Review, issue 1. The next two articles are reviews of a book by Wade Brown. The first, by Donald Parry, has moments of nastiness:
Notwithstanding the author's voluminous presentation of Hebrew poetry and parallelistic verse as demonstrated in this work, serious problems exist, both in his general thesis and in his method of formatting the text of the Book of Mormon.
While he correctly identified these varieties, and while all of them are important figures of speech, they simply are not parallelisms. Nor can they be considered poetry of any type. In identifying them to be such, the author has overstepped the bounds of discriminating scholarship.
On the other hand, Brown fails to include many important parallel types, all of which are attested within the Nephite scripture.
The second review, though, was written by David P. Wright, and it is a lot more reasonable:
By its own admission, the book is not a scholarly work but rather a witness of the author's religious convictions. Indeed, it was his family for whom the work was originally written as a "as a gift of his testimony of the language of the Book of Mormon" (p. i) that had the work published. This may account for the extremely brief and undeveloped character of the author's arguments and analysis.
The point of this review is not to question Brown's religious views, nor will it dwell on his metaphysical-historical judgments about the origin of the parallelistic form of the Book of Mormon which certainly can be questioned, even by scholars who view the book from an orthodox perspective. The point is rather to show that his layout of the text--apart from the problematic secondary material he has added--is a helpful contribution to the literary study of the Book of Mormon and has implications for further study.
Note how Wright is still critical, but he looks for the positives in the work. Parry's review, by comparison, is really a lot more negative: it is paragraph after paragraph of pointing out a variety of flaws. How, I have to ask, is this in keeping with what DCP described in his intro? Parry wraps up his review not by trying to counter his negativity with a final postive, but rather with the old, wrinkly Mopologetic refrain of, "There is still much work to be done."
The next was a positive review, by Lavina Fielding Anderson, and the next three (yes: three) were about a Book of Mormon geography book written by Bruce Hauck. More on this later, courtesy of an old thread by our dear, beloved Dean Robbers.