The Five Types of Academic Book Reviews

In this video I'd like to talk about
some of the most common academic book review strategies that are out there. Having been a graduate student myself at one point, and an early career
assistant professor, I know how difficult it can be to write a book review and to
be able to come across in a way that is graceful and tactful but also critical
and insightful. That's a really hard thing to accomplish, and so this video is
in part for those people who are starting out on a career in academia and
are having trouble thinking about the tone of a book review. But I think it's
also for students who might not publish their own book reviews but are often
reading them for research and trying to figure out how to make sense of them in
terms of what goes into them.

My point in this video is going to be that there are
sort of five common types of reviewers out there. And I think after this video,
if you watch it all the way through, you're going to start seeing these five
types more and more as you read book reviews. So we'll go through these fairly
quickly. The first type is what I'd like to call the summarizer.

The
summarizer is somebody who plays it very safe, somebody who doesn't want to make enemies in the profession, [who] knows that these people might be at conferences in
the future and kind of steers a safe path. What the summarizer does is the
summarizer takes full advantage of the typical structure of a book review. In
a typical book review you have your introduction, and the introduction
has usually three components. It has the thesis of the author (not your own thesis
so much, but sort of an explanation of what the author is arguing).

It also gives
some context, so it kind of says where the book fits in, and there's also
usually some opinion about the book itself. And so the reviewer is saying,
well this is what I think about the thesis and how it fits into the context.
Then we obviously have a series of paragraphs that follow afterwards in
which the reviewer outlines the different parts of the work and gives
some opinion about those different parts and how they fit together. And then we have some conclusion in which the reviewer states
his or her final opinions. What the summarizer does is the summarizer leaves out the opinion bit and simply tells you exactly what the book is about.

This obviously can come across as pretty boring. What the summarizer does to avoid seeming like you know ... Well, what he's
actually doing, which is just summarizing, we have all of these sort of fake
opinion words, words like "detailed" and "interesting" and "fascinating," and "new," and so on. And these words are hiding the fact that there's no opinion whatsoever.

The summarizer just simply goes through the book and summarizes it for
you, and that's all that happen. There are many book reviews out there like
this. It's a good way to play it safe and this is often what happens also when the
book reviewer is not an expert in the field, when the book reviewer basically
has picked up this copy, has no idea what to think about it, and so just sticks to
summary. Number two is the sycophant.

The sycophant -- let's draw a picture of him here ... He's gonna smile from ear to ear. And he's always happy. He's
always flattering.

I tend to think of the sycophant as like [in] that song
from the Lego movie: "Everything is awesome when you're part of the team."
When you're part of the team you're gonna praise everything that the
book does, and so the sycophant will use a lot of phrases like "this enhances
our understanding," "this is brilliant," "this is groundbreaking." And the
sycophant only criticizes the externals, so only the externals of the book
receive minor criticism. Those would be things like
whether the book has a dust jacket, or, you know, the odd spelling
mistake, or the spelling of somebody's name in the in the Works Cited. It's those kinds of things. They receive a little bit of criticism just so that
the sycophant can say "well, I did do some criticism." But for the most part
this is just simply flattery.

Thirdly we have what I like to think of as the
sandwich artist. Let me explain what I. Mean by this. And we'll draw a little picture of him here as well.

He's a little bit ambivalent. What the sandwich artist
does is like the summarizer he or she makes use of the structure of the review.
So we have that introduction and we have that conclusion. What the sandwich artist
does is if you think of these as like the pieces of bread -- very nutritious
bread -- the sandwich artist basically sticks all the criticism in the middle.
And so as a colleague of mine once said, this is what's called ... And this is a bit
crude ...

This is a shit sandwich. In other words, everything in the middle stinks.
It's lots of smell coming from there, but everything at the beginning in
the end is positive. Let's put a P there. So what you're going to see a lot in this kind of introduction is phrases like "with some
reservations," "in general," and so on.

And then at the end [we get] "these objections aside," or "these minor quibbles aside I can definitely praise this book ... Fantastic
book." But everything in between is, you know, this book is crap. So I think this
is a clever strategy to some extent to package it in this nice
format where it looks like it's a positive review but the middle is all
criticism. It seems like a good strategy but I think many people will see through
it.

They see that last paragraph and the first paragraph -- these
are not genuine statements of praise. They're merely there to kind of hide the
fact that the artist [reviewer] is too afraid to come out boldly and say that he or she
disliked the book. Then we have the honest, yet tactful appraiser.
I'll change color here because this is the one I like. This is what I would
recommend that you do.

So we'll just give him a happy face. There you go -- generally happy. And this is a reviewer who is honest but also
tactful. So this is a reviewer who sees some good in the book,
sometimes some bad, doesn't nitpick excessively.

So no nitpicking, and I think
that's really crucial. Sure, you might have more to say, but you're not gonna
say every single thing that you found that was bad about the book. You
can make a long list, but just select a few things as examples and leave the
rest for the reader to find out. Focus more on the positives.

Focus on what you
found good about the book. And this is something that career academics really
struggle with early on in their career, and I certainly can speak to this as
well, having been through this process. You want to stand out, you want to show
how clever you are, and so the risk is always that you're gonna do that by
putting other people down. That's not really what reviews have to be about.

I
think what you should really focus on is genuine interest. If you went into
academia because you wanted to do research, then surely that suggests that
you're actually interested in the topic. So as much as possible try to review
books that you think might match your interest, that are going to be
interesting for you, that you're going to learn from. And then express that! Be
excited about the process of learning.

There is a danger here though, and
I've seen this one as well. Sometimes people are so excited about a
new book that they start to have this whole conversation with the author about where this could lead and and how this ties in to other
research and so on. That's good and well, and that's interesting, but if it
goes too far then it leads away from the actual review. Often the reader just
wants to know is this a good book? Is it something beneficial? They don't need to
have this whole extended discussion about a particular topic that is of
interest to the reviewer.

So just be careful with that. Then the last one
is the scornful pedant, the spiteful pedant. We'll use some red here to draw
him, or maybe that's not quite dark enough. So let's give him a scowl, He
is not happy, and this is somebody who has nothing good to say.

This is sometimes a very experienced academic who has his little
piece of ... This field of research, and is guarding it against
anybody who tries to enter it. And anybody who wants to make a claim has to sort of pass through the gate, the gauntlet of this particular reviewer.
This reviewer can often be very personal, can be a little bit extreme in his or
her views, and tends to nitpick a lot. So watch out for that.

Try to stay with number four -- the honest yet tactful appraiser -- and also
avoid these other kind of lesser types of review strategies. You may want to
play it safe, but ultimately it's better to be honest and tactful. That's it for
how to review an academic book..