Book Review Instructions, History 264

Produced in association with Visible Knowledge Project

Book Review

Most of you wrote book reports in high school. A book report usually summarizes the content of a book or briefly retells the narrative and concludes by offering an opinion on the merits of the book. A book review does something different. It provides a critical analysis.
A book review discusses the main themes of a book, states the author's thesis (main point), describes the author's sources (evidence), assesses the author's use of the sources in arguing the thesis, and compares the author's work with other books on the same subject. If a book review offers an opinion on the merits of the book, it does so on the basis of the author's stated objectives, not on the basis of the reviewer's biases.
The word "critical" in "critical analysis" does not mean that you are obligated to produce an unfavorable review, nor that you should be disparaging in your remarks. It means that you should use critical reading skills to ask yourself what the author's objective is, what the author's thesis is, and how the author has used his or her sources to construct an argument using evidence that is persuasive. In the final analysis, has the author persuaded you--the reader--to agree with his or her interpretation of history?
Like every good piece of writing, your book review should be constructed with an introduction, the main body of the text (several paragraphs) in which you develop your analysis, and a conclusion.
Your book review should include the following elements:
Title
Introduction: Identification of the author and title of the book you are reviewing.
Main body:
Objective or purpose of the book as stated by the author, usually in preface
Thesis, main argument and secondary argument
Sources
Assessment of the author's use of evidence to support thesis

Is the author's interpretation convincing?
Provide examples to support your own position
Comparison with other books you have read on the same subject
Conclusion: Concluding evaluation
Your book review should be three to four pages in length, or 750 to 1000 words when printed double-spaced and in 12-point font.
If you want to include citations from the book you are reviewing, use quotation marks for the citations and insert page number on which the citation appears in parentheses immediately afterwards. If you choose to cite works other than the book you are reviewing, you should use the appropriate conventions of historical scholarship for footnotes and include a bibliography. A useful guide in this respect is Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 3rd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001). This book is available in the reference section of the Bartle Library.
Before you begin writing your book review, you should take a look at some examples of good reviews. I suggest you look at The Historian, a journal published by Phi Alpha Theta, the History Honor Society. You will find it shelved in the Bartle Library. Reviews are always published at the back of the journal. History majors or graduate students in History wrote many of the reviews you will read there. You are expected to follow the general format of the reviews. You are not expected to meet their level of sophistication.
Books of historical scholarship are not novels or works of fiction. They are described as "non-fiction" and are interpretations of events and phenomena in the past. Historians "argue" their case. They make claims and assertions about the past, but most historians do not claim to be able to "prove" what happened in the past. You should therefore avoid the words "prove" and "proof." You should also avoid referring to actors in the past as "we." "We" are actors in our own time, but we could not act before we were born. Once you have properly identified actors in the past, the appropriate pronoun to use is "they."