Genre Studies: The Book Review

You want to take a look at the characteristics of a book review before you get ready to write yours.  To do a good job with a book review, you have to determine the author's purpose, and whether the author was successful in achieving that purpose.  Writing these can be a little tricky (our impulse is to try and judge quality), but when you start to see the rhetorical moves, it's a writing task that is easy to replicate.

Step One:  Read at least 6 book reviews.  Your approach:  casual.  At this point, you are getting a feel for the genre.

Step Two:  Pick TWO book reviews to read CLOSELY (think, Hunger of Memory.  You read line by line, paragraph by paragraph, asking questions the entire way).  Chose reviews on books that are roughly similar to your book in approach and purpose:  Is the book a historical narrative, such as The Devil in the White City, and The Warmth of Other Suns?  or a memoir (Dust Tracks on a Road, Beautiful Boy, The Glass Castle),  or reportage (Blink, The Year of Living Biblically, Nickel and Dimed) ?  

I am NOT suggesting that you study a book review that has already been written about your book; you may certainly look at those initially, but then, turn your head away.  Learn to write without flirting with plagiarism and intellectual theft.

I AM encouraging you to choose reviews to work with that will give you the best help when it is time for you to write.

Become a Noticer:  Look at verbs.  Study sentence length.  Pay attention to point of view, and perspective (how often does the writer refer to herself in first person?  As "the reader"?)  Look at the level of praise or criticism.  Note that there is little in a book review that discusses "goodness" or "badness." Value judgments are carefully avoided.  Ask me why.

Step Three:   Print both reviews out.  Annotate both; write a descriptive outline for just one.  Two copies are DUE Thursday, October 18.

• HOW TO WRITE A DESCRIPTIVE OUTLINE:
• Paragraph by paragraph, write the following two things:
• WHAT the paragraph says - 1 concise, complete line of summary
• WHAT the paragraph does -- in other words, its rhetorical purpose for existing - 2 lines of effect, impact, work done by the paragraph

We will gallop through one of these in class.  I plan to whip through the example.

Nothing can replace the benefit of real work.  Don't be tempted to rush through your part of the process without taking the requisite time to read (casually) through at least a half-dozen book reviews; then, find two to focus on and annotate; finally, choose the one you will write a descriptive outline for -- methodically working through this process has plenty to teach you about writing analytical review.   Start to understand what we mean when we say, "Everything is an argument."

So read some reviews. (Music, theater, movie reviews follow many of these same rules, but for our purposes here, read book reviews.)  Yes, you should feel free to read book blogs, reviews on Booklist, Amazon, or LibraryThing, but these reviews vary widely in quality and are therefore not suitable for this assignment.  I want you to read reviews published by respected news sources:

The Sunday New York Times Book Review

The Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Washington Post

The Wall Street Journal

and others of this caliber.  If in doubt, be safe and check with me.