What makes for a good book review?

[traductio]

I think I might have asked this question on the old Fora, but I don't remember for sure.

At any rate, I'm a book review editor for a major journal in one of my fields. Most book reviews, I gotta say, are really bad. Not that they're unduly critical. They're just badly written -- chapter-by-chapter summary, tepid criticism, some statement about how indispensable this book will be.

I'm working with the editor-in-chief to revamp the review section. I actually think reviews can be fun to read and informative. (The tired formula I describe above seems like it should be informative, but it's really not. In my experience, it's cliché-ridden.)

So I'm curious -- what do you want to see when you read a review? What don't you want to see? I've got some fairly strong ideas, but I'm more curious to hear from others. (I have strong ideas about everything, which doesn't mean they're always widely shared.)

[hungry_ghost]

I actually don't mind chapter-by-chapter summaries since this often helps me figure out if I would find the book worth reading or not. ut they need to be accurate and well-written.

I can tell you what I DON'T want to see: a brief and superficial description of the book (brief and superficial enough that I'm not even certain that the author actually read whole the book) followed by a longer presentation of the reviewer's research, ideas, etc--basically a research note written by the reviewer that is tangentially related to the book under review disguised as a book review. I just read a review like that yesterday. Senior scholar reviewing work by senior scholar. Appalling stuff.

It is hard to find good reviewers. Reviewers don't get a lot of credit for book reviews. On my cv, N reviews = 1 article. N >2. We get a free book, which may or may not be worth having. A candid but negative review can be politically dangerous, and for sincere reviewers, is probably not very fun to write. A bland review earns the kind of criticism you make, and is also not fun to write.

I am curious, OP (though you may wish for others to reply before you respond) what would you like to see in a review?

My own rant: I am starting to suspect that a lot of scholars write more than they read, which is not a good situation at all.

[traductio]

I actually don't mind chapter-by-chapter summaries since this often helps me figure out if I would find the book worth reading or not. ut they need to be accurate and well-written.

I can tell you what I DON'T want to see: a brief and superficial description of the book (brief and superficial enough that I'm not even certain that the author actually read whole the book) followed by a longer presentation of the reviewer's research, ideas, etc--basically a research note written by the reviewer that is tangentially related to the book under review disguised as a book review. I just read a review like that yesterday. Senior scholar reviewing work by senior scholar. Appalling stuff.

It is hard to find good reviewers. Reviewers don't get a lot of credit for book reviews. On my cv, N reviews = 1 article. N >2. We get a free book, which may or may not be worth having. A candid but negative review can be politically dangerous, and for sincere reviewers, is probably not very fun to write. A bland review earns the kind of criticism you make, and is also not fun to write.

I am curious, OP (though you may wish for others to reply before you respond) what would you like to see in a review?

My own rant: I am starting to suspect that a lot of scholars write more than they read, which is not a good situation at all.

I like reviews that are short, maybe 500 words. One journal I recently contributed to (Great Plains Quarterly) publishes this type of review, and they're punchy, fun to read, and -- contrary to what I find with a lot of reviews -- they actually make me interested to read different books. (I think I've read too many bad chapter-by-chapter summaries to find them valuable any more. They're not intrinsically bad, but they're frequently rote.)

I also like review essays that are long, maybe 4000 words. I've been giving these to my PhD students as an exercise in my theory seminar. The idea is to write reviews that stand on their own as scholarship, where they're valuable whether or not you've read the books (usually three) that are the focus.

I'm with you, though, on the idea that people write more than they read.

[Hegemony]

The chapter-by-chapter summaries are the most valuable part for me. 

[aside]

I do find chapter-by-chapter summaries helpful, yet it is more helpful if the reviewer does more than summarize.  Particularly in material that is peripheral to my own work yet might be useful to me, I want to read about its quality, scope, and accuracy from someone with more expertise in the area.

[traductio]

I'm finding it really interesting to know that people find the chapter by chapter summaries valuable. I think my experience in editing them has likely colored my feelings about them (they can be so, so badly written, and they can get bogged down in detail in ways that demonstrate reviewers' failure to absorb and rearticulate an argument). Thanks for the insight -- it's good to get out of my own head.

[fourhats]

I think it really depends on the venue and readership. A book review for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) or the London Review of Books, or New Yorker would be very different from one in a specialized academic journal. So it's all about the audience.

[traductio]

I think it really depends on the venue and readership. A book review for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) or the London Review of Books, or New Yorker would be very different from one in a specialized academic journal. So it's all about the audience.

Very true. The type of book reviewed changes, too, in a scholarly journal (like the one I serve). My own books have been reviewed in scholarly journals but never the TLS!

[Parasaurolophus]

I like reviews that make it so that I don't have to read the whole book for myself, but can make targeted decisions about what's important for my purposes. So I also like a summary of the main claims of each chapter, as well as an analysis of the book's main strengths and weaknesses. Granted, that doesn't usually make for super-exciting reviews, and there are better and worse ways of going about it. I certainly don't want to just read a catalogue of what happens in each chapter.

I also like honest reviews of very bad books, even when they don't break the summary down by chapter or section. Here are two famous examples, both concerning books by the same hack: one, two.

[traductio]

I like reviews that make it so that I don't have to read the whole book for myself, but can make targeted decisions about what's important for my purposes. So I also like a summary of the main claims of each chapter, as well as an analysis of the book's main strengths and weaknesses. Granted, that doesn't usually make for super-exciting reviews, and there are better and worse ways of going about it. I certainly don't want to just read a catalogue of what happens in each chapter.

I also like honest reviews of very bad books, even when they don't break the summary down by chapter or section. Here are two famous examples, both concerning books by the same hack: one, two.

From one of the reviews:

At times, McGinn seems aware of the improbability (or "boldness") of his claims.

What an elegant use of scare quotes.

[Hegemony]

Oh, those reviews make me so happy.  "He muses, 'Is this why women tend to love jewelry so — because of a relatively high level of bodily self-disgust? Just asking!' In Colin McGinn a penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking!"  Oh, so much to relish.

[nonntt]

I agree that chapter by chapter summaries can be tedious - and also that they can be useful. When I've written them, it was because I didn't have a lot to say about the book. It was competently done and useful. Or it was a collection of essays with occasional interesting moments, but it didn't really add up to more than the sum of its parts. But the summaries have also been useful to me as a reader when I'm deciding if I need to track down a piece of secondary literature.

Perhaps the most useful review I've read, and one I've cited in my own writing, was a negative review of an acclaimed book by a famous historian. The book has inspired many efforts to uncover continent- and era-spanning connections between popular early modern popular culture and premodern history; the review made a convincing argument that there was a quite mundane explanation that didn't require the author's extravagant theories.

Not all negative reviews are the same. I will be quite content if I never again have to read, "The author fails to consider the perspective of X/theory of Y" in a book review. Sometimes that perspective or theory is relevant, but nearly always, it's just the reviewer's own research agenda, or their advisor's. That the author wrote the book that exists rather than some other book is usually not a useful or interesting critique.

Most books don't deserve a negative review. They're competent without doing anything too awful. The few times I've written negative reviews, it has required an immense amount of work and had no beneficial consequence. I once spent several months putting all my research time into a negative review of a very bad book. The scholarly workmanship was poor, there were plagiarized passages, it slandered living people, and its agenda ran roughshod over the facts. I cataloged the errors, distilled the worst offenses into a review, and sent it off to the reviews editor. The result was that he commissioned a second review, a superficial but positive review, to run alongside mine.

[Parasaurolophus]

Oh, those reviews make me so happy. 

Hehe, I'm so glad. They're pretty legendary. There have been others, including others about McGinn's "work", but these two are far and away the best. I use the McKenzie review (the second link) when I teach students about assessing sources, and not just relying on the imprimatur of what looks like a legitimate or reputable publisher.

My personal favourite quote:

For one thing, while contemporary metaphysicians are often tokenistic in their treatments, I think most would appreciate that looking at the    pictures in a book is of limited value qua research into unobservable entities, even  if it is the auspicious '1700-­‐page textbook University Physics' (p.129) that informs McGinn's critique.

[Myword]

  I wrote numerous short concise book reviews until I quit when I became uninterested in the topics.

             Are the ideas or themes presented in a fresh interesting way? Are concrete examples used? How is the writing style? Is the book too long or too short?
              Is the work easily accessible to a non-specialist or outside the field?
             
           
              Specifically, who are the readers for this? Specialists? Sub-specialists? This question is never answered because reviewers assume everyone in the field is interested. Not so.
In my field, some scholars in very contentious fields would not understand the jargon  or read it.  Overall, reviewers in academic (and crossover popular) books usually assume too much from readers and assume that the book is important when it is not.

[Hibush]

Thanks for developing new guidance for book reviewers so they don't simply repeat the clichés that others have fallen into. Many reviewers probably think those are not clichés but academic standards. Only an editor can correct that mis-impression and improve the scholarly value of the reviews.

I like when the reviewer has an opinion about the subject matter. That opinion should not be that the book is great or awful. It should ideally provide a related--but not identical--context for what the book argues (if it is that kind of book) or why the new scholarship matters.

It might be necessary to provide specific examples of high- and low-value chapter summaries, or of recommended audiences. That will help future reviewers move beyond the safe, familiar but unhelpful.