When you write an academic book review, the first thing you want to do is make
sure that your formatting is appropriate, and there are certain standards in the
field which don't vary too much. Typically we start with a citation of
the book. We want to make sure that we give some bibliographic information, and
as part of that citation, what's a little bit different here is that we
tend to give also the page numbers ... the total page numbers in the book. I'm not
sure if that's meant to indicate if it's worthwhile to read this, if it's too
short or too long, but some readers find that quite useful. When you give the page
numbers, one thing you can also do is you can give some account of how many pages
there are before official pagination starts. So, if you were to write, let's say,
"pp," that stands for pages, and then let's say in Roman numerals "xi,"
which would be 11, and then 328, then that would mean that there are 11
uncounted pages before we get to page 328 [to the other 328 pages]. Or if, let's say, the preface has
roman numerals, that's another way to indicate that after that, after the
pagination, we get to the price. And I would suggest that you just check a
major retailer (you know, whatever is appropriate for you) or you could look
for the recommended retail price that the publisher typically puts on a book.
There's also the ISBN number and the ISBN number (fairly standard) is
associated with the book and it allows people to find the book quite easily.
Then we have the reviewer's information which usually consists in a name and
email address and sometimes a university affiliation. After that you can start
your proper review. Now, this review is quite a good review it seems to me. I'm
not an expert in his field, but it seems like quite a good review, and I thought I
would use it as an example. You can find it online if you go to the Medieval
Review, which you can google, and that's quite a good site also to look for other
sample academic reviews. Now, as we move to the actual review, so
the rest of this, a typical academic review has a fairly formal organized
structure, and it really consists of three parts. The first part, the
introduction, can span any number of paragraphs. In this case we have
two introductory paragraphs. [It] takes the the writer a little bit to get going, but
that's totally fine, as academic book reviews often tend to be a little bit
longer than your average review. Now, this kind of introduction is going to do
three things. So, when you write your intro, you need to do three things. The
first thing is to give some context. We'll just put a C here for context. And
context can mean any number of things. It can mean talking about other people
in the field who have written studies and what their opinions are, sort of
what books are out there already on this topic, it can also mean
talking about today's issues and whether this book fits in with those, whether
people are concerned about those issues, you can start with a quotation that sort
of captures the question that we're dealing with. So there are lots of
different options. In this case what you can see is that this book is about
King John and it's about the Magna Carta, and as a result this reviewer is quite
clever in saying, well, let's think about how we are remembering these two events
or persons today. Right now it's the 900th anniversary -- does anybody care
about King John? Do we care about the Magna Carta? And then what have other
scholars said about these particular historical things. So there's quite a bit
of context here before we actually get to the actual book. That's totally
fine. You don't have to mention the book right away -- we know it's coming. And then
when we get to the book we get to the author's thesis. So I'm just going to
abbreviate this as the author's thesis (A.T.). You need to state what the main argument
is of the book that you are reviewing. In this case we read, "In this
new synthetic biography, Stephen D. Church resists explicit revisionism of
historiography of either Magna Carta or of the king
himself, and instead blah-blah-blah-blah-blah... It seems quite
complicated, but if you're in the field then you probably know what that means!
And that's another thing to notice ... that reviews tend to be very specialized.
They often assume that you know something about this topic already, that
you're not going to read this unless you have some prior interest. So you are
always going to write a review for really two audiences -- keep in mind that you have
two audiences. You have a general audience of people who are scholars and
might just pick up this book because it sounds interesting, and they'd like to
know what this book is about. That's your one audience, and then your other
audience is really these specialized readers, and you need to talk to both of
these audiences, but it's quite alright to be fairly specific and assume a
certain amount of knowledge about the period. Then the last thing that you need
to do in your introduction is you need to give your opinion. So I'll just
abbreviate this as "Op." We need context, we need the author's thesis, and we need
to know what you think. This particular reviewer takes a while
to get to this. You can see that in the second paragraph we finally see some
value judgments. This is "a successful study." It is "refreshingly non-
teleological" -- whatever that means. Those are the value judgments that we need to
get. You can't just summarize what the book is about. You need to have an
opinion about whether it's worth reading it, and then we get to the middle
paragraphs, and [for] the middle paragraphs you can have as many of these as you like.
I've just shown you a couple of snippets from this sample review, but most of
these middle paragraphs are going to follow a fairly detailed structure, and
there are three common approaches that you come across. One is
just to follow the same order of chapters and sections as in the original
book. So you could just follow the same order of chapters, and discuss
one or two chapters per paragraph, and then critique them as necessary. Another
way to organize things is by topic. In other words, if you find that the
original book is really focused on a number of themes
or topics, then you can organize your paragraphs effectively in the same
way as well. And then another way to do it is kind of criticism-based and what I
mean by that is that if you have let's say six or seven things you really want
to say about this book, then you can have a paragraph about each. But I hesitate to
recommend this last method because it can lead to a very choppy review. If you
have, you know, one point and then you jump over to something else, and then you
go somewhere else, and so on, the reader is going to be a little bit annoyed
and is going to have a hard time understanding the bigger picture or
the one thing that ties everything together. That's why I would suggest that
no matter what kind of criticism or method of critique you
pick (and there are many of these) always come back to the main argument of the
author. Always make sure that that is front and center. Sure, you can have a
paragraph that talks a little bit about external things, like, you know, the
cover art, or typos, and so on, but the main thing, the main line all the way
through, should be the main argument. Instead of thinking of these dots going
all over the place, think of a main road that's the
main argument you're describing and then as you do that you can have little
digressions -- you know, talking about some of these other points and other sites
along the way. Always be detailed, so if you look at these examples you can see
that it doesn't take long for the the reviewer to jump to specific points.
The reviewer is not not speaking in general, but is backing everything up
with details from the text. So always be detailed and remember that you are an
expert in the field, even if you don't feel like it. The reader is trusting
you to be an expert in the field. Now don't be a show-off,
but try to be a guide, try to hold the reader by the hand and kind of say, well,
I know more about the field than just this book that I've just read. I know a
lot more, and I'm going to share how this book fits in, how it's meant for you....
(In this particular review the reviewer's talking about what
kind of audience this is for). But as you do that again always come back to that
main argument and what you think of it. And then the last little bit here is
your conclusion. Now in this case we have one paragraph that really does most of
the concluding and there's you know some other paragraphs in-between here
obviously that I have skipped. In this case the paragraph is quite
positive, and I would suggest that you think about doing something similar. Even
if you have some criticisms, it's typically best to end on a positive note.
But don't don't lie. If the book really sucks you've got to say that! So on
the whole try to be positive, but be honest as well. Notice the little
reference here to Casablanca, the movie. You can be a little bit more
popular, a little bit more interesting, and you know in a review like this it
doesn't have to be stuffy. It doesn't have to be boring.
So it's up to you how you want to frame it, but on the other hand you don't have
to be super creative and have all sorts of hooks and interesting lines. The
main thing is really to explain to the reader what kind of a book is this. Is it
worth your time to read it? And how does it fit in with the state of research at
this particular point? Hopefully that helps you to write an effective academic
book review.