Activity: Find Book Reviews

Overview

Book reviews are one of the key ways that scholars in the humanities and history evaluate the contribution a book makes to the scholarly conversation. Because book reviews are an important publication format in the humanities, many journals in the disciplines include substantial book review sections (e.g., Modern Language Review). There are even journals that are just compilations of book reviews (e.g., Reviews in American History).

It is not uncommon for graduate students to be required to find, read, and write a book review as part of their academic coursework. Consequently, it can be helpful to expose yourself early on to examples of scholarly book reviews.

Activity: Find & Read a Book Review

Think of a scholarly book that you have recently read related to your research topic. Keep in mind that scholarly book reviews may not appear until a couple of years after a book is first published. You will need the title, author and year of publication.

So for example if you wanted to find reviews of UW history professor Stephanie Smallwood’s 2007 book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, you could do this type of search in UW Libraries Search:

Using one of the databases below find a book review by searching for the title in combination with the author.

• UW Libraries Search (covers all disciplines) – filter your search results to “Resource type: reviews”
• Academic Search Complete (covers all disciplines)
• Gale Academic Onefile (covers all disciplines)
• H-Net Reviews (Humanities & Social Sciences Online)
• JSTOR (good for books published a few years ago)

For additional book review sources see the Book Reviews page.

Bonus Tips

• Want to read more about the role of book reviews in the humanities and social sciences? See “The Scholarly Book Review in the Humanities: An Academic Cinderella?” and “In Defence of Writing Book Reviews.”
• If you need more advice, ask your cohort facilitators for assistance in Slack!