Ghost writer? Now there's a cop-out.
The NYTimes won't let people review a book if they are friends with the writer, have published with the same press, or have been involved in any way in that book's production. Those are pretty good rules.
As much time as I spend on golf courses, I am really above all else an editor. One thing I've learned is that you really cannot fairly evaluate a book in terms of a public, published review unless you have actually written a book yourself. The process of doing a book - the writing is the easy part - involves years of research, editing, collating, leaving things. That what makes it a truly different experience from merely writing.
I have a lot of experience with books, having published three of them, contributed to 20 others, and have served as a paid consulting editor on several dozen, half of them golf related, the other academic. So somewhere along the way you learn to be fair. You learn to judge and appraise a book in terms of what it sets out to do, how well it achieves it, and whether after reading the book you found something worthwhile during your four hours or four days that you would not have otherwise acquired.
You can tell pretty quickly if a book is really a serious book and what its tone, texture and basis are. It doesn't take long reading or redaing his work to see that Feinstein is your basic lightweight sports journalist with an impressive knack for self-promotion. He types quickly, does some research, relies exclusively on interviews, and the
result is your typical decent sports book. Some of his topics are better than others, but too often you read him (on golf, baseball, tennis) and what you realize is that he's trying real hard to write a book. His college basketball stuff is very different. There he knows what he's talking about. But on golf, he's on unsteady ground. He mkes up for it, however, on radio and TV by being forceful and eloquent in his pronouncemnet. Not to be mistaken for sound journalism, however.
My point is that reviewing requires making a series of jugements and then finding out how best to say that. Sometimes you say it directly, other times indirectly. I think what is important is that a review is just not a series of observations about a book; it is, itself, a piece of writing with a theme, argument, tone and direction. That's why writing reviews is not a simple matter and why there's always a bit of judgment, insider-ness and decision-making involved.