Wright's Tips on Writing Book Reviews From time to time in university-level humanities courses, you will be asked to write a book review. Despite their brevity, book reviews tend to be at least as difficult to write as essays and require, therefore, serious preparation. It is extremely important to note that a book review is not a book report. The purpose of a review is not to describe the contents of a book in narrative form but to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a book, to estimate its contribution(s) to knowledge, and to provide an opinion to its prospective readers of its general worth. The best strategy for familiarizing yourself with the ways and means of writing book reviews is to read some. All scholarly journals publish book reviews - I would direct your attention to the Canadian Historical Review and the Journal of Canadian Studies in particular - as do most literary magazines and arts supplements in daily newspapers. (The Saturday editions of both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail have book review sections.) Academic book reviews are readily available in any number of sources at university and public libraries. It will be considered part of your undergraduate training to familiarize yourself with the genre if you have not already done so. It is preferable that the author(s) you select for review be university-trained scholars. Many authors presume to write "history books" - including journalists, novelists, pundits, bureaucrats, etc. - but they rarely have the expertise to produce worthy historical writing and hence, as a general rule, they can be a waste of students' time. It is good fun to review a bad book, no doubt about it! But if you are trying to prepare yourself by means of your book review for your own research paper, I would strongly recommend that you select a scholarly book as your initial foray into a subject area. (The easiest means of determining whether your book is scholarly is to see whether it has been published by an academic publisher, i.e. a university publisher.) Only in the rarest of cases will fictional or non-academic books be acceptable for review in university-level history courses, and then only by permission of the instructor. |