Abstract
The best reviews begin with the reviewers. And the best reviewers are attentive, careful mediators, translators, go-betweens. They take others’ works and present the merits (and demerits) of these works to members of a third party: the readers of their reviews. Reviewers thus shoulder quite a bit of responsibility! For scholarly books, reviewers should be members of the intended (or potential) audience for the book, because they must know enough about the subject at hand (or time period, or location, or methods, or orientation, or theoretical framework, or ongoing debates) to be able to contextualize the contribution.
A review is “effective” when it adequately encapsulates the spirit and intentions of the book, making clear to readers what the author sets out to do so that individuals who have not yet read the book can decide whether reading it could prove fruitful. Let me offer three elements of such a review. First, an effective review offers a
Perhaps “effective” and “successful” operate similarly, with much in the eye of the beholder, yet I’d venture that “successful,” in terms of a book review, can be measured a bit differently: Do people pay attention to the review? Does it make them think differently about the topic, the problem, the question, the issue at hand? Does it make them consider ways that this book might connect to their own interests, fields, debates? Does it encourage them to engage with the book themselves? (To publishers—and, to a certain extent, to authors, as well—reviews that generate attention and, ultimately, sales are “successful.”) I’ve long felt that the best reviews teach their readers something. Yes, book reviews can in fact make scholarly contributions. I now feel that the apotheosis of a “successful” review would be one that teaches something to the author of the book under review! Reviews can (and should) aspire to serve as collegial, intellectual dialogues—but they’re written with eavesdroppers in mind.
In order to be able to review a book effectively, the reviewer must approach the book not as a scholar who mines the book for nuggets of “useful” information but as a reader who deeply and thoroughly engages with the text in the way it was meant to be approached. Normally, then, a reviewer should read serially: No skimming! No starting with the conclusion and reading backward! No jumping around!
A century ago, the Yale Review published a piece by Virginia Woolf that is titled “How Should One Read a Book?” The most common quotation lifted from that essay seems to be this one: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it” (Woolf 1926:34). Since writing is usually a messy, recursive act, let me instead draw attention to the second half of the sentence that comes just prior: “if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string” (Woolf 1926:34). Yes, Woolf was writing about fiction, primarily (and we can transcend her gendered pronouns); but scholarship is also creative work. The reviewer owes it to the author to try to figure out what is intended, what the author’s plans are for the articulation and development of the argument, and what sort of intellectual experience the book invokes. Full engagement is necessary. To Alan Jacobs, reading invites “the encounter with other minds” (Jacobs 2011:67). Reviewing exhibits that encounter. So, start at the beginning, and take good notes.
In fact, in my book, I argue that taking good notes is the crux of being able to write an effective review efficiently and enjoyably. While reading, reviewers should selectively note:
direct quotations from the text (always with page numbers);
direct, factual descriptive matter in their own words; and
commentary: observations, asides, associations, questions, inconsistencies, errors.
Emphasize the second and third points. If you have this material at hand, you’ll find that actually writing a review can be quite enjoyable.
To answer the second question first, it’s simply a function of time! I don’t know how many lifetimes I’d need to read all the books that I already know about! (In some cases, I’d first need to learn new languages. Cue Jorge Luis Borges’s comment about Paradise being “a kind of library.”) Reviews serve an important filtering function—and by that I’m not referring to filtering in a gatekeeping way. Instead, I mean that reviews bring to my attention books that I otherwise might have overlooked.
As for reading reviews, I recommend that you do three things: First,
I’ve been writing reviews for over two decades, and I was all ready to begin answering this question by mentioning the internet. But then I checked to see when H-Net launched, and I couldn’t believe that it launched in 1993! Even Goodreads has been around since 2007. But I’m still going to go with my gut: Because of the internet, everyone has become a critic, and everyone feels entitled to an opinion (even folks who don’t have adequate foundations for chiming in on whatever subjects they’re assessing). This “democratization” of platforms sounds as if it would be ripe for sociological analysis, and, in fact, Phillipa Chong has authored a study of the profession of (literary) book reviewing (Chong 2020; see also Fürst 2021, Gump 2021).
Another development that feels more recent is the ubiquity of academic blogging. Reviews can be found everywhere these days, and many self-published reviews can be quite helpful, especially because they can appear quite quickly after a book becomes available. What’s next? Is there a BookTok for academic authors yet?
As a book review editor, I still receive submissions that read like book reports. That is, there’s too much summary and not enough assessment and analysis: too much “what?” and not enough “so what?” Perhaps some reviewers are reluctant to insert themselves into their reviews. Avoid such reluctance. Readers of reviews deserve to know something about the reviewers, especially since reviewing pivots on judgment and trust.
Finally, scholarly reviewers seem to be less critical than in prior generations. I get it: Nearly everything we write these days is findable online, and scholarly communities are small. The older I get, the more I agree with skewing positive. Nobody’s perfect, and a reviewer who can extend a bit of grace now and then is often the ideal reviewer.
A scholarly reviewer needs to describe what a book is about as well as how its author goes about making and supporting its claims. A book’s structure and organization can be important, but they should serve the broader argument. A reviewer can summarize a book rather efficiently, as long as its claims are clear. (Have you seen the websites—LibraryThing is one that springs to mind—that allow readers to offer haiku reviews?)
To move beyond the summary, the reviewer first needs to know what descriptive material is fundamental for understanding the gist and the tone of the book. (Yes, it’s easy for that material alone to fill the allocation of words for the review. So the reviewer must be selective.) The descriptive material does not all necessarily need to be presented at the outset of the review! Some of the most engaging reviews I’ve read have addressed questions raised by the contents of the book, filling in attributes about the book along the way. For example, if a book offers four case studies, each of which is presented in its own chapter, a savvy reviewer can simply mention the topics of the four studies in a list. Yes—in a single phrase! Perhaps one chapter might be described in greater detail, exemplifying points the reviewer wishes to make about the book as a whole. Treating each of the four case studies equally in the review would likely not yield as engaging a review. Minimally, a review needs to provide sufficient information about the book under review in order to be effective. (But “sufficient,” like “effective,” is open for interpretation!)
Well, at the extreme end of possibilities, you could always decide not to review the book. (If a book has been assigned by a book review editor, communication is paramount. The just thing to do in such a situation is to return the book—or to offer to pass it on to someone who would be willing to review it.)
First, though, ask yourself why you didn’t like the book. Remember that scholarly book reviews aren’t questions of taste, per se. If a book really didn’t resonate with you, for whom might it resonate? You don’t have to agree with the conclusions reached in another scholar’s book, but you do have to be willing to try to understand how those conclusions were reached. Scholarly books—at least those published by academic presses—have been peer reviewed, so someone else must have found merit in the work. Sometimes I’m presented with a book but can’t quite figure out how it was accepted for publication: And then writing the review becomes something like the unraveling of a mystery.
Of course, if you have major reservations with a text—if, for example, it makes you angry or upset—you might not be able to offer a fair review.
If you decide to write a “negative” review, always step back from your full draft for a few days before rereading it. When you reread, imagine that the review is about a book you have written. You might very well decide to tone down some of your criticisms. You don’t have to lower your standards—just shift attention from problematic material to stronger material. And, trust me here: You don’t want to be snarky, no matter how fun it might feel. Also warn the book review editor if you sense that your review may be too critical; the editor might have some suggestions.
Oh, I wish I’d had such a seminar when I was a graduate student! In my book—which perhaps should have been titled Why to Review Scholarly Books instead of How to Review Scholarly Books—I write at length about the point your students raised. Of course there’s the instrumental reality: By reviewing scholarly books, you can learn a lot that applies to your own writing (yes, of peer-reviewed articles and books and other things that “count”). But time and resources are finite, and book reviews are essentially uncompensated work. What matters just as much as what you learn by reviewing is that you are performing an important service to your intellectual community. You are being neighborly, collegial, unselfish. Book reviews are gifts. Freeden Blume Oeur, in a beautiful essay in Contemporary Sociology, describes them as “provisions of care” (Blume Ouer 2023:500). And in the words of Kevin Dettmar, they are “quiet acts of professional courtesy and generosity” (Dettmar 2022:183). If you can review, you should, at least occasionally—if only to give yourself something to feel good about. Folks looking at your CV, by the way, will spot your generosity.
One acronym: AI. AI-generated “reviews” are nothing new. And I’ve already seen AI-generated books. (I was recently asked to review a 480-page cultural history of France . . . without a single citation!) The presence of these intrusions (or abominations, depending on your perspective) only underscores why the very human acts of writing and reviewing are more important than ever. We need thoughtful reviews of thoughtful books; we can let the computers respond to each other’s offerings. Now, AI is already transforming research. That opportunity is being tapped and will continue to grow. But the challenge will remain to insist on human intervention when it comes to communicating and assessing the resultant scholarship, especially since the abilities of AI continue to evolve. As long as we keep writing, reading, thinking, and reviewing, I remain optimistic about the future.