Book reviews — and here I mean those that are written for strictly academic purposes — serve four essential, and sometimes conflicting, purposes. They can: 1) summarize the book so that busy academics don’t have to waste time reading it but want to still appear as if they have perused it when talking about it; 2) provide a tool to retaliate to that ridiculous colleague (the author of the book) who asked ‘a very small question to an otherwise excellent paper’ which totally destroyed your argument; 3) allow you to climb up the academic ladder by extolling the virtues of your supervisor’s (or another important person in the field) latest ‘path-breaking contribution to the literature’; 4) help you pad your CV in case during your intense three years of writing the thesis, researching, and wasting time you have not had the decency to get an article accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. Since my advice is oriented towards early career academics, I will not focus on option 2) even though it is tempting to do so because it places less burden on my conscience and does not force me to dig down through the book and my brains to find something positive to say just so that some other poor soul (apart from me) is enticed to read it.
The opening sentence. Please, do a favor to your readers: write a nice, thought-provoking first sentence. Even we, the people in academia, need some ‘fresh air’ sometimes. Think: what is this book about? Great! Now, write it down, in the form of a question. If the book is about global governance and democracy, then start with: ‘Can global governance be democratic?’
Summary. Depending on how desperate you are to get the author’s benevolence, this can comprise anything between 55-75% of your text. The best way to go about it (or, at least, the way I do it, which is the same thing) is to read the whole book and take notes while doing so. If, by the end of it, you haven’t got a sense of what this whole book is about then well maybe you should stop wasting society’s resources and do something productive instead of a PhD. Alternatively, you can go back to the introduction. It is amazing how many authors are aware of the fact that almost nobody reads beyond the intro and they indeed manage to cram the gist of their argument in it in the hope that their 2-3 years effort will make it at least to somebody’s footnotes if not references.
How should you organize your summary? Well, it really depends on the type of book and on your analytical skills. Basically, books are either monographs or edited volumes. If it is a monograph, then it’s easy: the author has conveniently summarized everything for you in the intro so just follow it. You should also read the short summary on the back of the book because this ensures that what YOU thought was the main point of the author and what THEY thought they were saying coincides. Since we are focusing here on advancing your career and not destroying it before it has even started, in case of discrepancy just force yourself to accept that the author knows better what they are talking about. Once you get tenure you can write a genuine review.
By ‘follow the intro’ of course, I do not mean that you should summarize each chapter. This is awfully boring for the reader and makes your review read like a laundry list.Instead, summarize the argument and the proof that the author provides to support it. Laundry-list type of reviews are acceptable only in one occasion: when the book is outside your narrow field of specialization and you are not confident that you can reproduce the argument correctly.
As for an edited volume, there are two possibilities: 1) the editors feel responsible enough to at least write an intro and conclusion to a book whose only purpose is to show their department that they are doing something; 2) the editors are lazy and irresponsible and have left you wondering what certain publishers mean by ‘quality standards’. With regard to 1), you can proceed as you would with a monograph:using the intro, summarize the main theme (there rarely is, if ever, a proper argument in these books unless they consist of commissioned case-studies) and then mention how different chapters address it. For example, if the book is about Global Governance, mention that there are different chapters divided, say, by policy: environmental, human rights etc. Try to mention all of them. In case you have been unlucky to get a book from category 2) then, after spending good 10 minutes cursing yourself, the authors, the publishers etc try to extract several common themes somehow (maybe from 2-3 chapters) and proceed from there.
Critique. Critique, unless you want to commit a career suicide, always has two parts: positive and negative. I like to start with the positive as it is the harder one for me 
The good thing is that it can be general so you can praise the sound theoretical framework,the rich empirical basis (or the combination of the two), the application of a theory to a new case, the timely and much-needed consolidation of previous knowledge (yes, this is an euphemism for a mere ‘state of the art’ review) …be creative and suppress your desire to disparage the work. Also, mention how it relates to other works in the field: does it challenge them, does it corroborate their findings etc. In other words, place it within the debate. You should use the appropriate language: a book that is radically different ‘provides a refreshing perspective from a hitherto neglected angle’ or ‘challenges mainstream accounts by providing a compelling alternative’. A nondescript book whose only (hopefully unfulfilled) purpose is to advance the author’s career is ‘extending current theoretical knowledge and adding new empirical data’.
Now, after you have completed your duty, you can be really critical. Again, sadly, you don’t have tenure yet so be careful. Edited volumes, while difficult to summarize are easy to criticize: they often lack a coherent theoretical framework and even if they do have it, the different chapters rarely adhere to it. Even if they do adhere, they are not of the same quality: some provide less evidence, others are terribly written. If they are of the same quality…well, in that case, please send me the book, otherwise I will not believe that it exists. Select the chapters you do not like and explain their weaknesses. Unlike positive ones, negative comments have to be specific and supported by examples; otherwise it looks like you are too self-confident. They also soften the blow to the author as s/he thinks that the drawbacks are only confined to these 2-3 examples while the rest of the book is brilliant. If you really want to play safe, use appropriate language; use ‘providing more evidence would have strengthened the argument further’ instead of ‘there is insufficient proof to support this argument’.
As for monographs, well the author must have focused on 2-3 cases so the easiest thing to criticize is the case selection. In EU studies, if the author has chosen ‘big’ member states, argue that s/he should have included a ‘small’ or a ‘new’ member state. Another possibility is to point to the lack of consideration of an alternative explanation. If the author is employing a rational-choice argument, then point to a constructivist explanation and vice versa. If both are used then point to the epistemological and ontological problems of bringing these approaches together.
The end. You should always end on a positive note: ‘despite these criticisms the book makes a significant contribution to the theoretical and empirical understanding of X and thus would be suitable for (here, insert the type of audience: scholars, students, practitioners)’. If the book only summarizes existing knowledge, end by saying that it ‘serves as an excellent reference’.
Check the word limit, proofread and send your review. Go to sleep without feeling guilty: after all, the worst thing that can happen is that somebody reads your positive review and spends money on buying the book; now, admit it, one day you would want a hapless scholar to do the same for your book, wouldn’t you?
Tags: Book Review, writing
September 28, 2009 at 5:25 am |
Good recipe! Just an afterthought: what about reviewing several books at once? There are such reviews too:)