Writing the Academic Book Review
Original article by Wendy Laura Belcher—Edited for Econ 411
Why Write a Book Review?
Writing book reviews is a good way to improve your writing
skills, develop your analytical skills, and learn
how the publishing process works.
Choosing a Book
Think about what kind of book would be most useful to you.
Since book reviews do take time, like any writing, it is best to choose a book
that will work for you twice, as a class assignment and as
a tool to help in your future.
For example if you are interested in banking as a future career, I would
suggest reading a book that is related to banking.
If you do not follow that path, at least select an area that interests
you because you will need to read a whole book.
To identify a suitable book in your field:
• Look up the call number of the favorite book in your
field and go to the stacks of the library. Do a shelf search around the call
number to see if anything similar or related has been published in the past
couple of years. (New books are always
better, but not required)
• Go to any book database—our on-line catalog, Amazon.com,
the Library of Congress—and search using two or three keywords related to your
field (e.g., Great Depression, New Deal, CCC) to find books in your area.
• Read magazines that review books before publication—such
as Choice, Library Journal, or Kirkus Reviews—to get a sense for interesting
books that will be coming out. A librarian can help with those publications.
• Read those academic journals that list books recently
received for review or recently published in their area. (The Journal of
Economic History has reviews.) This
will provide good examples as well as help you with the style of a book review.
Once you have identified several books, locate copies and
skim them. Pick the book that seems the strongest. Do not pick a book that has
major problems or with which you disagree violently. No book is perfect, but
reviewing a book that you strongly disagree with (or even agree with) may impair
your unbiased attention. That said,
if you really feel strongly that you must write a negative review of a certain
book, go ahead and write the review. Academia is, after all, more
confrontational than most students realize.
If we do not judge each other’s work, we can not weed out poor quality
research.
Choosing a Journal
Identify leading journals in your field that publish book
reviews. One way to do this is to search an on-line article database. (e.g.
JSTOR) Using several key words from
your field, limit your search to book reviews and note the journals where the
results were published.
Reading the Book
It is best, when writing a book review, to be an active
reader of the book. Sit at a desk with pen and paper in hand. As you read, stop
frequently to summarize the argument, to note particularly clear statements of
the book’s argument or purpose, and to describe your own responses. If you have
read in this active way, putting together the book review should be quick and
straightforward. Some people prefer to read at the computer but if you’re a good
typist, you often start typing up long quotes from the book instead of analyzing
it. Paper and pen provides a little friction to prevent such drifting.
Take particular note of the title (does the book deliver
what the title suggests it is going to deliver?), the table of contents (does
the book cover all the ground you think it should?), the preface (often the
richest source of information about the book), and the index (is it accurate,
broad, deep?).
Some questions to keep in mind as you are reading:
• What is the book’s argument?
• Does the book do what it says it is going to do?
• Is the book a contribution to the field or discipline?
• Does the book relate to a current debate or trend in the field and if so, how?
• What is the theoretical lineage or school of thought out of which the book
rises?
• Is the book well-written?
• What are the books terms and are they defined?
• How accurate is the information (e.g., the footnotes, bibliography, dates)?
• Are the illustrations helpful? If there are no illustrations, should there
have been?
• Who would benefit from reading this book?
• How does the book compare to other books in the field?
• If it is a textbook, what courses can it be used in and how clear is the
book’s structure and examples?
It can be worthwhile to do an on-line search to get a sense
for the author’s history, other books, university appointments, graduate
advisor, and so on. This can provide you with useful context.
Making a Plan
Book reviews are usually 600 to 2,000 words in length. It
is best to aim for about 1,000 words, as you can say a fair amount in 1,000
words without getting bogged down. Some say a review should be written in a
month: two weeks reading the book, one week planning your review, and one week
writing it.
Although many don’t write an outline for an essay, you
should really try to outline your book review before you write it. This will
keep you on task and stop you from straying into writing an academic essay.
Classic book review structure is as follows:
• Title including complete bibliographic citation for the
work (i.e., title in full, author, place, publisher, date of publication,
edition statement, pages, special features [maps, color plates, etc.], price,
and ISBN.
• One paragraph identifying the thesis, and whether the author achieves the
stated purpose of the book.
• One or two paragraphs summarizing the book.
• One paragraph on the book’s strengths.
• One paragraph on the book’s weaknesses.
• One paragraph on your assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses.
Avoiding Five Common Pitfalls
1. Evaluate the text, don’t just summarize it. While a
succinct restatement of the text’s points is important, part of writing a book
review is making a judgment. Is the book a contribution to
the field? Does it add to our knowledge?
Should this book be read and by whom? One needn’t be negative to evaluate; for
instance, explaining how a text relates to current debates in the field is a
form of evaluation.
2. Do not cover everything in the book. In other words,
don’t use the table of contents as a structuring principle for your review. Try
to organize your review around the book’s argument or your argument about the
book.
3. Judge the book by its intentions not yours. Don’t
criticize the author for failing to write the book you think that he or she
should have written. As John Updike puts it, “Do not imagine yourself the
caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any
ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind.”
4. Likewise, don’t spend too much time focusing on gaps.
Since a book is only 200 to 500 pages, it cannot possibly address the richness
of any topic. For this reason, the most common criticism in any review is that
the book doesn’t address some part of the topic. If the book purports to be
about the Great Depression and yet lacks a chapter on banking in the 30s, by all
means, mention it. Just don’t belabor the point. Another tic of reviewers is to
focus too much on books the author did not cite. If you are using their
bibliography just to display your own knowledge it will be obvious to the
reader. Keep such criticisms brief.
5. Don’t use too many quotes from the book. It is best to
paraphrase or use short telling quotes within sentences.