Why use book reviews?

The short answer is: to save time. Book reviews are wonderful resources. The main reasons for using book reviews are to figure out: (i) what the book is about; (ii) why it was written.

What are book reviews?

Book reviews are short documents, usually a couple of pages at most, which (should) summarize the main arguments the author made in the book concerned. The reviewer, who is also an expert in the area as the author, usually places the book in the context of scholarship and give a judgment as to if the book is sound or not. Thus by reading book reviews, it is always possible to see what is new and exciting in academe.

Potential pitfalls of reviews

Academics are humans and so they are not perfect. If you are a student, this comes as no surprise. Reviews full of praises may have something to do with the fact that the reviewer and the author are friends and conversely very harsh and critical reviews may be due to personal animosity. Thankfully such cases are quite rare. More often the level of generosity and criticalness depends on whether the reviewer and the author share similar views on history should be written or what are important in scholarship.

Also there is going to be a time lag between the publication of the reviewed book and the appearance of the reviews. But that is becoming less of a problem as there are more and more on-line reviews available.

Compare the reviews

Most books deemed important in the field are reviewed by a number of journals. To gain a better overall picture, it is crucial to find more than one and ideally three or more reviews of the same book. As with academics, journals have different editorial policies and have different emphasis on what they consider to be important in their field. You might like to read a review by the journal that is most relevant to your needs. Make sure that your reviews come from a reputable source. Peer-reviewed academic journals are the best, then well-known newspapers and large edited news sites. But the most important tool is your critical faculty!

Finding reviews

Most academic journals have sections dedicated to book reviews. Newspapers, especially the weekend editions, have a number of shorter and non-academic reviews. There are also on-line reviews. Each has pros and cons. The easiest way to find a review is typing the title of the book in question in inverted commas ("[name of the book]") and the word review in a search engine. The best is scholar.google.com.

And finally ...

However useful the reviews may be, there is no substitution to actually reading the book, so don't write your essays or papers based solely on book reviews. It's a bit like writing an essay by watching the film version of a book rather than reading the work.