There's nothing quite so satisfying as an all-knives-out book review, and in her tenure as the lead literary critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani has consistently dished them up. Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane, was dismissed as "a weak, risible" volume; Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down was condemned as a "maudlin bit of tripe"; and Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone, was reviled as "an odious self-portrait of the -artist as a young jackass".

And this approach, while delicious for readers, has naturally won Kakutani enemies. Earlier this week, a Harvard student newspaper reported that Franzen had said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times". Salman Rushdie has described Kakutani as "a weird woman", while Nicholson Baker said that one of her reviews "was like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia".

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world's most influential book reviewers.