Specifications for Book Reviews
The guidelines below are not just made up for this course. Most of them are standard professional practice. 1. Review a good, scholarly secondary work that will provide support for your research. 2. Look up some published reviews—at least two—of the work you are reading for review. You can find these by using America: History and Life, by checking historical journals at the time the book was published, or in some cases by doing a web search. Make notes from the published reviews. 3. The length of your review should be 500 words (a standard length for book reviews in historical journals). 4. Double-space throughout, including the heading, and print with margins of one inch all around. 5. For the general format of the review, consult recent numbers of the American Historical Review, journal of the American Historical Association. Do it the way they do it. 6. In any book review the most important things to consider are what the purpose of the book is and whether the author has achieved it. Sometimes the purpose is stated plainly in the preface; other times you have to infer it. In either case be sure that you discern and evaluate what the author was trying to do. 7. Summarize the content of the book, but don't let the summary take over the review. Be concise in summary, so that you have room to do more than that. 8. Comment on the quality of various aspects of the book—its sources, organization, methodology, literary merit. You can't discuss all such aspects, but you can touch on the striking ones. 9. Comment on the significance of the book. What notable facts, interpretations, or methods does it offer to historical scholarship? 10. Pay attention to your grammar and punctuation. Don't turn in your first draft; revise and edit and make it a clean document. 11. The best way to learn about book reviewing is to read reviews. By doing this you learn about good book reviewing and bad book reviewing and begin to see the difference between the two. Most historical journals have sections devoted to book reviews; peruse them. In addition to the AHR, you might take a look at the Journal of American History and The Historian, and perhaps at North Dakota History. You'll see differences among them.
Submission of Book Reviews Send the first draft to me by e-mail, a Word doc attached to your e-mail message, subject heading: Book Review. I’ll edit the draft and return it to you, also meet with you to talk about it. After you have revised the review, send it back to me again. At that point I’ll convert it to a PDF and link it up to the bibliography of secondary literature in the wiki. |
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