Dave: I adamantly agree with reasons 1-3 for doing reviews, but I'd suggest an asterisk beside number 4. I've done at least a half a dozen reviews in the past five years, but always at the request of editors with whom I'd already had a strong relationship. I believed that reason 4 was true for many years, but when I wrote to journals that I wanted to get closer to with very polite and professional queries, I never once got a positive response, and even got two fairly nasty ones, including one from an editor at one of the magazines mentioned above.
It feels to me that there is a clubby aspect to all of this--and, mind you, I know I obviously benefit from being an associate member of sorts of the formalista club--but I'm not at all persuaded that a nonacademic off the street can send samples of good work and a polite query to an editor of a major journal and get "admitted." You can for a few of the most desperate and obscure journals, but they tend to go out of business shortly thereafter without your review seeing the light of day.
I'm probably guilty of being whiny, self-centered and immodest by raising this point, but a similar argument seems to go also to whether your books get reviewed too.
Sorry for being difficult.
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