Writing a Critical Book Review

[_MrStakhanovite]

This is a fantastic thread, with excellent contributions Reverend. I wish people would give up the pretense that FARMS (now Mormon Studies, I believe) is anything but a partisan rag that appeals to a person’s more base instincts with ham handed polemics.

[_Kishkumen]

This is a fantastic thread, with excellent contributions Reverend. I wish people would give up the pretense that FARMS (now Mormon Studies, I believe) is anything but a partisan rag that appeals to a person’s more base instincts with ham handed polemics.

I wish Blixa woud jump in to contextualize Mormon apologetics within its tradition of violence from the early days forward. She is the one best qualified to speak to that issue.

Thanks, Stak!

[_Kishkumen]

The Journal of Chiropractic Education, of all publications, offered these guidelines:

A final note regarding book review writing is on how to convey criticism. A book review is an evaluative critique.4 Readers are interested in the book reviewer’s opinions and a reviewer should not be afraid to state opinions.4 Any factual mistakes, shortcomings, or weaknesses should be made known.6 However, reviewers should be respectful to the authors and write in a professional manner. Book reviewers are not anonymous and the rules of basic courtesy and libel law apply.25,31,32 Given that book authors are often readers of book reviews, any unwarranted criticism likely will be read by the book author.10,18 Hill14 and Boring47 recommend using descriptive comments, and not conclusions, to describe problems identified in books to allow readers to arrive at their own conclusions. Any criticism should be substantiated with examples or a relevant explanation of the reasons for the criticism to avoid confusion about a reviewer’ s arguments.14,33 Criticism should also be constructive.10,18,33 The reviewer, where possible, should provide suggestions for improvement, because these suggestions may influence the crafting of a future edition.

[_Kishkumen]

Another resource from the UK:

7. Evaluation - Remember that most academic books are works of professional conversation and shared scholarship. Even if a book is personally irritating to you, your job as a reviewer is to introduce and evaluate the book for other professional scholars. Be charitable in your summary, taking the book on its own terms. When you introduce your own criticisms and reservations, articulate them in a way that other professionals will find helpful. Make suggestions about how the argument might have been improved, how the selection of primary and secondary sources could have been more effective or what other works might address the same topics in better ways.

8. What did you or didn't you like about it? Be critical, but courteous. Conclude with some advice on whether and how other scholars should use this book in their own research. Relate the work to other scholarship in the discipline. How does this work add to, or argue against, other similar scholarship? What does this work add to the discipline?

[_Kevin Graham]

This is great stuff KIshkumen, and long overdue. I was wondering when you were going to do something like this.

[_Kishkumen]

The article, "Reading and Writing Book Reviews Across Disciplines," by James Hartley (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, July 2006) offers the following insights and information:

Amabile (1983) put forward the interesting suggestion (and tested it with undergraduates) that negative book reviewers were seen as more competent and intelligent than were positive reviewers. Furnham (1997), however, failed to replicate this finding in a better-designed, but still not fully adequate, study. Here negative book reviewers were seen as having less literary expertise, competence, and intelligence.

Maybe being a slam-artist does not reflect well on the reviewer after all?

Some of the findings of the research presented included undesirable qualities in academic book reviews:

Some of the characteristics of the dreadful book reviews were listed as follows:
• Poor writing
• Reviewer inappropriate to the task
• Reviews containing incorrect and/or insubstantial claims
and references
• Reviews which were all content and no critique
• Reviews which failed to discuss the book’s argument and
worth
• Reviews written to show the superiority of the reviewer
• Reviews, which were too short, long, terse, shallow, pedes-
trian, self-serving, bitchy, negative, sarcastic...

[_Kishkumen]

Wendy Belcher presented the following in a workshop sponsored by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center:

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.”

Ahem.

[_Kishkumen]

Rachel Toor writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

But it's hard work to write a book review. It requires art and craft to come up with something that engages in a serious and fair way with the material but also goes beyond the particular work to open out into bigger issues. It's equally hard to make the review—and this is sometimes too much to ask or expect—a pleasure to read.

[_Kevin Graham]

Wendy Belcher presented the following in a workshop sponsored by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center:

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.”

Ahem.

ROFL! You're cracking me up Kish. Someone needs to post this at MAD. Could it be more clear that NAMIR is not a scholarly organization? BYU is first and foremost a religious organization trying to cloak its apologetic and indoctrination agenda in the garb of academia.

[_Kishkumen]

Scholarspublish.com provides these interesting pieces of information:

Ideally, book reviewers are impartial and qualified scholars. When placed in a prominent journal, a review can guide scholars to theoretical books that redefine a discipline’s self_conception and research goals. Reviews can guide teachers, helping them select classroom texts and find useful classroom references. As a final check on the editorial process, reviewers can raise the flag around a book that isn’t receiving the credit it deserves, or, if necessary, lower the flag on a weak contribution.

In the world of academic writing, however, book reviews rarely receive the credit or attention they deserve. Given their potential to change the face of scholarship, book reviews play a remarkably insignificant role. In part, book reviews are not treated seriously because the book review process has been tainted by the Star System, in which scholars trade off reviews on each other’s books. “You rub my back, and I’ll rub yours” is the underground code that often controls who reviews what and where it appears. In addition, as Stephen North argued at a recent Conference on College Composition and Communication, editors determine which books are reviewed, an arbitrary decision_making process unparalleled in other academic genres. Also, editors rarely publish multiple reviews of a single book.

As reviewers of scholarly books, however, we need to control our propensity to assume that we know the best way to do things. We need to focus on what is really important and describe this information for our readers. And yes, in the spirit of presenting an objective evaluation, we also owe our readers some commentary regarding significant deficiencies. When carefully reading the work, therefore, you may want to divide comments into thirds: One, describe the contents of the book and its organization, while paying particular attention to the new knowledge the book contributes to scholarly discourse. Two, mention the significant weaknesses. Three, focus on the strengths.