elements of a good book review


I’ve been publishing academic book reviews since 2015. Among genres of scholarly writing, I find this one requires special care. Unless you have permission from the journal to write a review essay, in which case the essay will likely be subject to peer review, you don’t have room to expand on your points. Reviews in my field run from 750 to 2000 words, depending on the venue. You must also consider the readership of the journal, which might range from nonspecialists interested in the topic of the book, who need a general orientation, all the way to experts in the subfield, for whom even a minor error in your review could seem glaring. Finally, while accurately summarizing another scholar’s views goes into the larger academic genres, in a book review it is the whole game. If you don’t do that well, it won’t be a helpful review.

Why publish reviews? If your own book is receiving reviews–and if you are fortunate enough to be paid a salary to do this work–it is fair to give back. It’s a public form of peer review. Plus, the book and the journal can signal your established expertise on a topic, or your intention to move into a new subfield. It’s characteristic of book reviews that the “questions left unanswered” or “areas for further nuance” in the eyes of a reviewer tend to be ones that the reviewer her/himself is actively pursuing. And taking on a review can be the push you need to read an academic book cover-to-cover, an experience I have always found edifying.

While journals usually commission reviews, a process that can entrench institutional and social hierarchies, you may put yourself forward as a reviewer. Many journals consider unsolicited book reviews, and many will publish reviews by PhD candidates. Simply explain who you are and what qualifies you to review the book.

Successful book reviews share certain features, typically in this order:

  1. Introduction. This places the book in some larger context, one more immediately recognizable to the journal’s readers. Common contexts are a problem, a text, a field, and the author’s career.
  2. Description. It’s amazing to me how many book reviews skip this part. In order to appreciate all the other elements of the review, the reader needs to know the book’s structure, the titles of the chapters, and a summary of the book’s argument. The goal is to state the author’s ideas in terms the author would approve. This is a good place to include quotations from the book that, in your estimation, epitomize the author’s approach.
  3. Synthesis. It is understood that there is too much in an academic monograph or, especially, an edited collection for a review to transmit every analytical move. You must choose a path through the material. You are obliged to mention any idea important enough to be the focus of a chapter or perhaps a long section of a chapter, but anything below that level is up to you. At this point in the review, you may be making connections between the author’s ideas that the author does not explicitly make. (If so, be clear about that.)
  4. Evaluation. You have been asked to write this review because you have expertise relevant to evaluating the book’s arguments. Do they hold water? What are their implications for study of this text or period or problem? What is their institutional or intellectual context? How does the book stack up against previous books on similar topics? This is the part of the review that will command readers’ attention, since it will be most different from other reviews of the same book. Resist the twin temptations of a book review, which are not to evaluate at all (often we have a weakness for neutrality early in our careers, for pragmatic reasons), or else to be thoroughly negative (generally senior-scholar behavior). Throughout elements 2-4, the reader should be able to reconstruct from your prose what the author was aiming at, and why, even if you feel the author has not achieved it. Because the review is so much shorter than the book, it must be representative: avoid nitpicking.
  5. Conclusion. Regardless of any criticisms you have leveled at the book, end with some praise or, if you cannot muster praise (!), a prediction that the book’s impact on the field will be positive.

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