Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer. Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

 

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer
Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Sometime during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith, Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the truth sets us free. 

Elliot Page's Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said this because bad writing matters. "Writing clearly is thinking clearly." Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad writing is a worthwhile use of time.

I'm thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short, physically handicapped novelist didn't deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he was Hitler's right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels' speeches, movies, school curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how we use them matter a great deal.

In my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer to Elliot Page as "she." Rather, I focused on, as I said in the review, "sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence." I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.

A few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon provided, and saw an error message. "That page does not exist," the message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.

Perhaps a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same message. "This page does not exist." Again,  I received no notification, and no explanation.

I shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.

On September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before deleting them all said the same thing. "Thank you for reporting a fake review," or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn't been reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say that on Amazon.

I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.

I panicked. I called my bank and checked for suspicious activity. I changed all my passwords. I contacted my computer's anti-virus provider and ran multiple scans. I contacted Amazon and chatted with one robotic, ill-informed, and powerless customer service representative after another. This activity took hours out of my work day.

An Amazon customer service representative named Lorraine investigated the source of the spam and the malware. This is a direct cut and paste from her chat in reply to me, "I can confirm that it came from Amazon." So, yes. Someone at Amazon used Amazon's mighty powers to spam, harass, and threaten to infect the computer of someone who broke some Amazon rule, a rule that was never articulated.

Amazon has my credit card numbers. Amazon has my address and phone number. If some unnamed troll at Amazon hated me so much because of two book reviews that that person would attempt to infect my computer with malware, that person could use my home address to wreak who knows what damage. Amazon knows my tastes. Someone had sent me an Amazon gift card that still had money on it, money that Amazon could now swallow. I purchased a computer from Amazon and I also purchased a warranty from Amazon and Amazon owes me computer repair, repairs I may never receive. Amazon sells my books and can make my books easier or harder or even impossible for customers to find. And, of course, Amazon is the storehouse of my reviews written over the course of almost thirty years.

Lorraine kept reassuring me. "Rest assured that your account is safe and secured." Lorraine told me that I'd shortly be receiving more formal notification from Amazon certifying what she had told me, that is, "your account is safe and secured." Subsequent customer service representatives similarly assured me. A costumer service representative named Shalom said "Please be assured" that your reviews are not lost.

What Lorraine, Shalom, and others promised did not occur. As a test, I tried to post a review. I received this message, written in red, no less. "We apologize" – I'll bet they do; I love the fake humble tone – "but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon."

On Saturday, September 16, I received an email from "Florencia" at Amazon. "We encourage customer content on the Amazon.com website, both positive and negative. However, your recent contribution on Pageboy: A Memoir and Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World did not comply with our Community Guidelines." The rest of the email was the text of my reviews of Pageboy and Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. "Florencia" did not offer any explanation as to how my reviews of Pageboy and Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World did not comply with Amazon guidelines.

I'm guessing that I posted my first Amazon review over a quarter of a century ago, because I remember reviewing a book published back then. John Guzlowski had just self-published Language of Mules. The book was a hard sell, as are all self-published books, and all poetry books, and all books on tough topics. John wrote about his father's years as a prisoner in Buchenwald, and about his mother's having been a slave laborer for the Nazis. In writing and posting a positive Amazon review of Guzlowski's book, I was helping jump start the career of a man who has gone on to be twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Amazon was a godsend for me. I have spent a lifetime trying to find books about my parents' natal countries, Poland and Slovakia. There were no such books in the libraries I had access to as a child. Suddenly, an affordable copy of Jozef Mak, a novel about Slovak peasants like my mother, a rarity I'd never find in any book store anywhere near me, and certainly not at a price I could afford, was within reach.

I devoted much energy to reviewing worthy books, often by small publishers, about the Holocaust and World War II. These were books that lacked marketing campaigns and that might otherwise go unnoticed. These included reviews of:

* Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust documents Poles who rescued Jews;

* Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 describes survival tactics of Jews who survived Nazi occupation;

* The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery; Witold Pilecki was a Polish underground fighter who volunteered to be smuggled into Auschwitz to record atrocities and to attempt to lead a resistance;

* The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War a grim but necessary focus on how World War II played out in Poland;

* In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen recounts the unbelievable, but true tale of one Jew's survival in wartime Poland;

* The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt: War Through a Woman's Eyes: 1939-1940 a brutally graphic eye-witness history of Warsaw under Nazi occupation.

* Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust by Michael C. Steinlauf

* Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross.

I also strove to provide, in my Amazon reviews, a counter to New Atheism, reviewing books like The Moral Arc, by Michael Shermer, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. My review of The God Delusion was the most popular critical review. When Amazon still allowed comments under reviews, a lively debate ensued under my review. It was one of the most stimulating discussions of believers and non-believers I've yet seen.

I also occasionally reviewed books about Islam, including Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer. And A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan.

And every now and then I'd review a popular novel. It was a point of pride when my review of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett became the most popular critical review of that book.

These reviews had been up for years, until suddenly, in September, 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page, and Christian Cooper, and was, afterward, harassed, accused, and erased. These reviews are now all gone.

Amazon reviews have real-world impact. I met one of my most important friends on Amazon. She and I are both bookish women. She lives in Israel; I in the US. Her Jewish loved ones were murdered by Nazis. My Catholic loved ones were murdered by Nazis. Without my now erased-presence on Amazon, we two bookish women with roots in a common ancestral homeland would never have met.

Recently, I paid a lot of money for a necessary household item. The item was good, but it broke in an unexpected way. I contacted the seller and the seller implied that a positive Amazon review from me would increase the chances that they'd replace the item. I liked the item, was happy to provide a positive review, and received a replacement.

Robert Ellsberg, author of All Saints:  Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time used a quote from my Amazon review of his excellent book to market a new, revised edition. I have also used quotes from positive Amazon reviews to market my own books.

Amazon reviews matter so much that there is much discussion – does Amazon manipulate reviews? Amazon itself has fended off accusations. It has an "anti-manipulation policy." Even the New York Times has commented on allegations of review manipulation at Amazon. By deleting negative reviews of protected books written by powerful, celebrity authors, Amazon gives the public a false image of those protected books. Amazon creates a false image of books and authors it does not protect. Several books and chapters within books by me appear on Amazon. Amazon protects none of my works – nor do I want it to. Reviewers have called me crazy and much worse, and called my writing "nauseating." Amazon did not delete any of these attacks on an author who is not a celebrity marketing a Woke brand of identity politics. In manipulating reviews, Amazon is not just protecting some authors and some books. Amazon is protecting some ideas. Amazon is an ideological player, dictating right and wrong, creating an elite and a class of outcasts.

I lived, for a time, in the Soviet Empire. My mother kept up a regular correspondence with her family in what was then Czechoslovakia. We knew that totalitarianism limited what we could say to our loved ones, and how our loved ones could respond. Artist Rafal Olbinski created a powerful poster for the 1981 film Man of Iron. It shows a blue-collar man's head encased in a hardware nut. The steel nut encircles the man's eyes and ears so he cannot see, hear, or speak. You can see the poster here.

I always felt, when interacting with my friends and family in Eastern Europe, the noblesse oblige of a wealthy woman interacting with the impoverished. I was an American. That word – American – seemed as if it should be written in neon, in all caps, in letters that flashed red, white, and blue, and played "Stars and Stripes Forever" performed by John Philip Sousa himself. Unlike that Polish worker in Olbinski's poster, I could see. I could hear. I could speak. I could write. My loved ones, living under Soviet Communism, could not.

I posted about the Amazon canceling on Facebook. A Polish friend said he couldn't believe it. He knows I'm an honest person and would not make this up. He just couldn't believe it. Another Polish friend said, "I'm so glad I'm not an American." He believes he has greater freedom of speech in Poland than I have in the US.

Yes, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites are private entities and they can dictate whatever terms they want. But there's more to the story than that simplistic analysis. Activists often sneer at any mention of the harassment and threats that JK Rowling has endured ever since she posted that women should not be fired for saying that "sex is real." Some sniff that Rowling has Midas money and can hire all the security she needs. That's true, but it misses the point. Most people are not JK Rowling. Most people observe the vitriol and death threats inundating JK Rowling and say to themselves, "I can't afford to risk that. I'd never find another job. My kids' safety is paramount. I need to keep my mouth shut." Just so, when Amazon makes a decision about what can and cannot be said, it has far-reaching consequences.

Many people have sent me private messages on social media. "I agree with you. I can't say so publicly. I can't risk it." My leftist, Atheist, and Christophobic social media contacts love to cite my church, the Catholic Church, as the epitome of the suppression of free speech and freedom of conscience. I ask them, are you aware of those who have had to go into hiding, who have lost jobs, who have lost access to their own children, because of something they said? It's not conservatives squelching free speech. It is the Left.

Of course I support limits on free speech on social media. The kinds of speech that should be deleted include threats or fomenting of violence, child pornography, or stereotyping of the "all ___ are ___" variety. Of course Amazon violates these criteria. Amazon sells, for example, The Official Polish Joke Book, a genuinely disgusting compilation of hate speech. Amazon has a history of selling Nazi memorabilia and anti-Semitic material. Amazon sells a notorious book that includes bomb-making instructions.

I do not post porn, violence, threats, or racism. But according to social media's speech censors, I do. I was once severely punished on Facebook for, allegedly, posting a violent threat and hate speech. What was the violent threat and hate speech? It was a photograph of Lee Rigby in his full dress uniform, cradling his toddler son in the crook of his left arm. I posted that photo with no accompanying text. It was 2013, and Lee Rigby had just been murdered by jihadis on a London street in broad daylight. For posting that photo, I was sent to Facebook jail for a week. My account was put under a watch and I was warned that any further hate speech or incitement to violence would result in a permanent ban. I was told that my posts would appear further down in feeds; this is part of "shadow banning," where social media uses its ability to highlight or bury posts to make them more or less visible. Ten years later, when Facebook doesn't like something I post – and this is always because Facebook's robots have misunderstood my post – I am reminded that I have a history of hate speech and violence and could lose my account at any time.

No, we Americans are not living under what my friends and relatives lived under in Soviet times. We are not, like a priest in my mother's natal village, being tortured by Communists past the breaking point. But what does it do to a society, long term, when the hammer comes down, not in a Soviet style blow to the head, but in drip after drip of acid rain? A teacher uses an unapproved pronoun, and is fired. A cop "likes" a joke on Facebook, and is fired. A baker refuses a commission to design a cake for two entitled men and spends the rest of his life in court. An Amazon review disappears with no explanation. What do we become when we try, in our daily lives, to step over this minefield of small, non-lethal explosions; when we try to avoid entanglement in this invisible and incomprehensible spider web of ever changing denunciations manipulated by the Left? We become afraid, like those otherwise stalwart friends who can only speak their minds to me if they know that no one else will hear, and only after I have promised them that I will forget ever having heard them, and never to mention their words again.

I just took a break from writing this essay to check my email inbox. A friend just wrote to tell me that he just finished a book on early Soviet Russia – and he he is now afraid to review it on Amazon.

And what does it say about the mindset of whoever it was who carried out the campaign against me? The spamming of my email inbox, which was confirmed by Amazon to be from them. Sending me a link that would damage my computer, again, confirmed by Amazon to be from them. The erasure of all of my reviews going back decades, with no explanation, no recourse. Whoever did this is no Stalin, but this person is surely a totalitarian. What does it say about America that people who cannot debate, but who can only destroy, wield any power at all? What is this anonymous and unreachable Amazon saboteur like as a spouse, as a citizen, as a friend? When corporations train their employees to be little Robespierres, they undermine society.

One of the thrusts of Tom Holland's excellent book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is that Catholicism offered humanity a mechanism for addressing an inescapable human problem. Humans screw up. There has to be an avenue from "human screwing up" to "human can function again." Christianity offered sin, repentance, confession, penance, forgiveness, and reintegration. Christianity offered a narrative that lubricated the ritual. In Genesis, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. In the New Testament,  Jesus, dying on the cross, prayed for the forgiveness of his tormentors. Holland is an atheist but he and other atheists bemoan, or perhaps fear, what will become of a culture that has rejected the Christian concept of forgiveness and all it offered the individual and society. The Left's rejection of rehabilitation is evident in many more forms than Amazon reviews.

Amazon's decision not to make explicit why it removed my reviews reflects similar policies on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. If you actually tell users why their content was removed, users can understand the playing field, and gain power and confidence thereby. "Okay," one might think. "If they don't want me to use the pronoun 'she' to refer to Elliot Page, then I won't use that pronoun, and I'll be in the clear." In my review of Pageboy, I struggled to adhere to the rules; I did not refer to Page as "she." That was apparently not enough. What did I do? I have no idea. I have asked Amazon over and over to tell me what rule I broke. All the customer service representatives do in reply is send me the link to the guidelines, with no indication of which guideline I broke.

The refusal to spell out any rules is a totalitarian move depicted in Franz Kafka's The Trial. That black box approach is a petty form of terrorism. This morning Katherine, a social media contact, suggested that perhaps I had said something racist. That's why they had to remove your review. You said something racist. If I had, Amazon could have highlighted the racist statement and said, "See? This here is where you violated our guidelines." But there is no such clarity. In the murkiness of vague allegations, the accused cannot absolve herself. You can't redeem yourself of innuendo, of an unnamed, but only implied, crime.

There's another reason Amazon might be avoiding naming exactly what it deems unacceptable. Amazon, in its profitable marketing of racist, Nazi, violent, and anti-Semitic material, would violate its own rules.

Social media contact Otto Gross, himself a "tech guy," sent a protest post to Amazon. Gross wrote, "If you want to solve the problem of unintended violations, since you're a tech company, write an AI that points out words that violate policy and underline the offensive material before someone can post a review. Put the review in, hit check, and if it passes the post button un-greys. Underline words or paragraphs that are problematic. It’s frustrating to put the effort in only to be met with silent bureaucracy." Of course Amazon will not do this. To have to say, publicly, "This is racist; this is not," would put Amazon in a position of needing to defend its policies. That would be risky. We mere mortals take on risk. A money-spinning behemoth will not risk one dollar of profit to defend what it purports to believe.

Did I save my reviews? Most of the reviews Amazon deleted are forever lost. Even if I could post them someplace else, they would never be seen by the audience that Amazon delivers.

I did save a copy of my review of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's Samaritans. That review is directly below. Because Amazon removed this review by me, this priceless classic now has no Amazon reviews. Amazon sent me a copy of my review of Pageboy. That review is below the review of Samaritans.

***

Samaritans, my review erased by Amazon.

THRILLING. MOVING. PROFOUND. ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS YOU WILL EVER READ

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's and Zofia Lewin's "The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust" is one of the most thrilling, moving, and profound books you will ever read. It is one of the top ten books I've read in my entire life. I hope never to forget the lessons it teaches.

In a sense, the stories "Samaritans" contains are simple; their details are the details of concrete choices made in face-to-face human encounters. No one here commands a battleship, great armies, or the attention of the masses. Average people, very much like you and me -- children, blue collar laborers, office workers, a gang of drunks out on a spree --  simply decide to exercise the limited powers they have to make a positive difference in one human life. In doing simple, common things, the real people in these pages display a heroism that is overwhelming in its purity.

On a dirt road, an imprisoned Jew begs Maria Kobierska, a small Polish Catholic girl, for water as, nearby, Nazis guard the transport . . . a Warsaw man must determine a way to dispose of the bodily waste of the many Jews he has hidden in the attic of his apartment building, unbeknownst to his fellow apartment dwellers . . . Dominican Mother Superior Anna Borkowska instructs Jewish resistance fighter and her "right hand," Abba Kovner, in the use of the grenades she brings him . . . carriage maker Staszek Jackowski continually extends an underground bunker in which he eventually hides 32 Jews just two blocks away from Gestapo headquarters . . . secret agent Stefan Korbonski cannot understand why the BBC will not publish the war news he has been sending, at great risk, from occupied Poland . . . finally he is told . . . The Brits refuse to believe Korbonski's report of the Nazi genocide of Jews.

"Samaritans" is an anthology of short accounts of Poles who saved Jews during World War Two. The accounts range from one to several pages. Some are told by the rescued; some by rescuers; a few are told by third parties.

Because they are first-person accounts, some written shortly after the war, some written during the war, reading them requires attention and patience. It's as if you are reading the private diaries of dozens of separate people. You may be a paragraph or two into an account before you are fully oriented -- before you know exactly what town you're in, how old the main characters are, or even their gender. Be patient. These accounts, unmediated and unedited as they are, display raw power. These accounts convey an immediacy and an urgency that more carefully edited versions of the Holocaust do not.

It's exactly because the stories involve average, obscure people in everyday settings in which you can imagine yourself that they have so much power. This book isn't about Hitler or Eisenhower or Roosevelt. It's about a drunk stumbling home across a short-cut, and stumbling onto an escaping family in need of help. The drunk could ignore the people he's stumbled across; he could turn them in and make a tidy fortune for himself; or he could help them.

You can imagine yourself in these scenes. When was the last time you saw someone in need on the shoulder of a highway? Did you stop? Or did you just ignore the needy person, hoping someone else would take care of it? In short, these stories, about an epochal event in a country far away, are also about our everyday lives, and our everyday choices. Are we the kind that looks away and assumes that someone else will take care of it? Are we the kind that profits from someone else's misfortune? Are we the kind that risks, and that helps? When we are offered the opportunity to be heroes, what do we do?

"Samaritans" is an invitation. It proclaims: the only thing separating a hero from you or me is simple human choice. Experts insist that we are all selfish Darwinian wind-up toys, that ideals are silly fantasy only a fool believes in, that focus on pleasuring the self is the only good. The selfless heroism of these Samaritans incinerates cynicism. Driven by faith --  "Because I was a Catholic" --  by political ideals -- "as a Socialist" --  by loyalty --   "He was my friend" --  by personal integrity -- "I knew I could never live with myself otherwise" -- these Samaritans risked torture and death. With people like this in the world, we have to acknowledge that there is such a thing as goodness, and that we can exercise it whenever we so choose.

No one featured in "Samaritans" was solely responsible for the salvation of an individual Jew or a group of Jews. As historians point out, it took only one traitor to betray a Jew to the Nazis, but it took several people, perhaps even an entire village, to protect one Jew. Again and again, Jews on the run encounter person after person who can't take responsibility for their entire safety, but who can give shelter for the night, a new suit of clothes, counterfeit documents, or even just a glass of water.

As small as these gestures were, Poles were tortured and killed for them. Maria, the Polish girl who provided water to a thirsty Jew, was arrested and damaged for life. Other Poles featured here were beaten to death, put in concentration camps, and burned alive. Children as young as three were shot to death.

It is a sin and a crime that this book is so little known. While other, important books detail the crimes we committed during World War Two, a book that proves the reality of human goodness is out of print. By letting this book go out of print, we have let humanity down. Buy it, read it, stock libraries with it: the least we can do.

***

Pageboy My review

A MESS. DISHONEST. NARCISSISTIC. BORING. PUBLISHING THIS WAS ETHICALLY WRONG

The publishers should not have published this book. They exploited the ramblings of a distressed person in order to capitalize on celebrity and hot gossip. "Pageboy" rejects sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence. It reads like the diary of a troubled teenage girl who is not doing well in English class. The poor writing is reflective of deeper problems. "Writing clearly is thinking clearly." The author of this book is not thinking clearly. This book doesn't come anywhere close to making a coherent case for surgery or lifelong drug dependency. Much of the book consists of hyperbolic accounts of crushes followed by sex. There is sex in a school bathroom, after a pick-up in a bar, with a woman involved with a man she loves and has no intention of leaving. These accounts begin more or less like this. "This person was so amazing. I was amazed. I was hypnotized. It was all so wonderful." This is a paraphrase, not a direct quote. These accounts end with the author feeling sad. There are also brief sketches of films. There are a few paragraphs dedicated to a wispy sensation that ends with a double mastectomy. Again, this is not a coherent passage. The author is not thinking or communicating clearly. The book includes a gratuitous account that humiliates the author's father for no discernible reason. Everything relates to the author's narrow vision, which is focused mainly on the self. The author backpacks through Eastern Europe and appears to see or learn or be moved by nothing. It's all me, me, me. It's rather astounding that anyone could backpack through the part of the world that includes Auschwitz, a monument to the nadir of human evil, and Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and see, and hear, and be moved by, and learn, absolutely nothing. This book struck this reader as profoundly dishonest, lacking insight, and doing a disservice to society. I did pity the author, who, as a tiny, vulnerable young person with a dysfunctional relationship to parents, was thrust into international stardom, without the interior scaffolding necessary to traverse that terrain safely. But the author is saying and doing things that are not helping the self, or the wider society, and the author lost my sympathy for that reason.

***

I attempted to contact Amazon repeatedly to ask if they'd like to offer a comment on this article. I received only robotic replies that suggested that I might not be talking to a human being, or, in any case, a human being with any cognition or volition.

If you'd like to voice an opinion to Amazon about their behavior, you can click on the "help" icon on the Amazon homepage or try this email address: community-help@amazon.com.

Various Amazon employees with whom I have chatted over the past ten days have promised me that my reviews will reappear. The email I received contradicted that positive message. Amazon's stance could change at any time.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery