Why Review?

Buried beneath a stack of papers, dangling at the bottom of the priority list, obscured in the shadows, hidden in plain sight. This is the book review, so ubiquitous to the academic enterprise that it is both readily disparaged and easily dismissed. It’s taken for granted until it reveals something essential gone unchecked in earlier iterations of quality control or until its architecture is appropriated for a shameless hit job.

Yet the book review is always more than what it is assumed to be: There is an art to it, the subject of many a recent academic conference panel, and there is a craft to it, a form—potent, reliable and durable—that takes practice and patience to master. And above all, there is a hope to it, a hope that reading and writing do what our ideals want them to do, to demonstrate a skill, to further a discipline, to bring people together.

Indeed, “There is something hopeful about writing a review,” as Christine Smallwood notes in an essay from a recent issue of The Yale Review. “It’s like putting a message in a bottle or sending up a flare,” she continues, for a review signals to others one’s “passionate attachment to literature.” It may be challenging to see the academic book review as performing a similar illumination—a similar communion—for those in a profession that consigns the activity of reviewing to the sterile, thankless-sounding category of “service to the profession.” But despite how easily book reviews go off the radar, they are central to the academic enterprise—not only as the product, but as the process through which academic books are studied. And in doing so, we become academics ourselves.

This is what Steven E. Gump’s recently published How to Review Scholarly Books: Reading, Writing, Relishing (Princeton University Press) reminds us of in its tripartite subtitle. The first two acts—reading, writing—are fundamental to a competent review, while the third, often-hidden act, relishing, is vital to a successful one. What Gump relishes is what a book review can do: not just the skills the assembly and delivery of a review teaches, but what the review announces about its writer, that in writing a book review, “You are saying, in effect, ‘I am here, and I care.’”

Gump lays out in five chapters (and four between-chapter interludes, plus one postlude) a careful, granular guide to academic book reviewing, from motivation to execution to publication. To the initiate, these steps are essential; to the initiated, they are refreshing. Think first about the venue for your review and whether its doors are open to you. Then obtain a copy, preferably a hard copy of the book to review, that one can write in. But before writing, there must be reading: a type of reading that is diligent and charitable, driven by a way of organizing the mind that only academics do.

Gump guides the reader through the peculiar combination of surface and depth, of in and out, that constitutes reading an academic book for review. First, understand the origins of the book, how it is organized. Then pivot outward, considering the design and layout. Move back inside, attending to its rhetoric, how the author uses language, how they define their terms, how they put theory into practice. Read it all the way through. Then, after considering its core, return to its peripheries: Reconsider the title, the front and back matter, the introduction a final time, and then check your notes before writing.

What Gump describes is a dance, the microcosmic moves that lead to the macrocosm, the iterative steps that slowly and surely build a thorough, tested, vetted reading of a book. For the graduate student whose mind is a migraine of theories, for the junior scholar whose LMS is filled with papers to be graded, for the senior academic who is feeling a little lost or very jaded, Gump’s book offers not only relief, but the conviction that the book review returns us to the practices, writ small, that in their impact, writ large, led us to the profession in the first place. The review is meant to show that you know how to read, that you have read and that your reading is as trustworthy as you find the book itself to be. And thus the reader of your review will trust you to show how the book is worthy of their own reading, their own commitment, when there are so many books and so little time.

The academic book review is a mode of reading that helps other readers, makes their lives easier, lets them see the big picture faster and ultimately teaches them about what the reviewer has read. The book review is thus not an act of mere service but an act of collegial charity. The book review is a conduit between a writer who has worked hard to produce a book and a reader so busy with their own work that they may not otherwise pick up that book. It is the book review that brings these two together in a sort of imagined community in which, while neither may ever meet in person, they come to know of each other and the greater good each are a part of.

How to Review Scholarly Books has the tone of a professor who is delighted that you’ve stopped by his office—of a professor willing to go back over the day’s lesson but, unlike in the reserved and revered space of the lecture hall, willing to admit his own early mistakes so you don’t commit them, and more importantly, willing to unashamedly enthuse about his craft. Of the book one has decided to review? “Admire it.” Of essentials to include in the review? “Make sure to mention how the book transformed you.” How present or absent should the reviewer be in the review’s prose? “A book review is not about you, but it is not without you.”

And, like a professor in his office, Gump is willing to offer shrewd, insider information. When it comes time to write, for instance, consider verbs, adjectives and adverbs carefully, for the “strong sentence, capable of standing on its own” is not only more precise, it also has the potential of being picked up by a publisher for copy and circulation. A good book review can gain the attention of a press, who might reach out for you to be a peer reviewer, or who might remember your name when you try to set up a meeting at the big conference to discuss a book of your own. But such returns will not come without performing the basics of reviewing: “The core components of a review—contextualized summary, clear analysis, and cogent assessment—are nonnegotiable,” Gump writes. Why so? The professor in his office is willing to be a little audacious. “Reviewing, as a creative, intellectual act, is a scholarly activity in its own right.”

This it is. For contained in the book review are the habits of mind that bespeak all other habits we can call distinctively, peculiarly scholarly. To be a little audacious myself: In the book review, an academic’s life can flash before their eyes. At the beginning of that flash are moments that are so elementary one does not realize until much later that they proved so pivotal. We are taught, after all, to review from an early age. The predominance of reader-response criticism, especially in secondary education, offers a gateway to a life of review.

Near the end of high school, or at the beginning of college, comes the annotated bibliography. For faculty like myself who often teach composition, we know the strain and surprise of seeing students work through that form for the first time, as we move students the way we were once moved, away from the temptation to let an abstract speak for a source and toward the art of neutrally summarizing the source, for the merits one sees, in one’s own words. Freshman year, perhaps the annotation was a paragraph, but by senior year it had become a page and would continue to grow in graduate school, both longer and more detailed, including more of our own, now-learned slant. And reviews continue in abundance, from the private notes one makes for the comprehensive exam to the public demonstration of the art in the literature review of the dissertation, that intimidating, foreboding chapter that shows what we know and whom we dream to converse with.

We come to academe by way of writing reviews. The book review is a tool of self-definition and for joining a community. It may be the first publication, the way in which we learn more broadly about the inner world of publishing. It may be the way one learns the art of academic boxing—the vehicle through which a junior scholar, punching up, comes out swinging; the vehicle through which the senior scholar, instead of bobbing and weaving, shows how they have learned to take it on the chin. And it may be the way one learns that the community of scholars is governed as much by communion as it is by conflict and, ultimately, rue. While one may hope, like Smallwood, that the review is a message in a bottle that will reach someone eventually, it is also the case that book reviews float, just barely above the surface, never catching the attention they deserve.

One learns through the review the bitterness of academe’s priorities: Yes, being reviewed is important (until it is not); no, reviews “count” for little to nothing on the vitae (but the expectation is that you will do them anyway). I think it says something about our commitment to the habits of the academic mind that we continue to review even when the benefit is nil. Gump is right: We review because we care—not only about the skills that the book review allows us to practice, but for something more ephemeral that we call, with both love and sadness, a profession.

We continue to review throughout our careers, not only as a way of keeping abreast of developments. Indeed, this is where Gump sees the real worth of the book review, for “when a book reviewer teaches me something about a book I otherwise might not have picked up … I am often liberated from the norm, from the known. In short, my horizons expand.”

Literary critics may notice that what Gump describes as the work of a good review is its capacity to defamiliarize, the very promise of figurative language to contest, reshape and revive what words can do. For all its impersonality and procedure, the book review is ultimately personal, for it not only reviews a text, it also leads the reader of the review to review himself, to see himself anew. The norms, the known, are jostled if only for a moment, and in that moment, the horizon that was once staid now expands, with new sights, with new insights. This is the act of thought, and it is as rare as it is a joy.

Academics are, from beginning to end, a reviewing species. Think of the reviews you have committed to print. Now think of all the reviews you haven’t: every article, every book that resides by habit of review somewhere in your memory. Even the ones that reside only in the mind erupt at times, such as when a student comes to you with a question and you are suddenly reminded of the book you read, the one with the red cover, and though you only remember it was in the first third of the book (and likely on the verso side, about halfway down), there’s a claim that you know will prove insightful for the student at the door. It’s the sort of sudden reminder that makes your face squint, as if the book were in front of you but at a distance, the sort of squinting I do in front of a student who has come to explore their senior thesis topic. It is a squint to show that I am scanning the bookshelf of my mind, pulling the book I implicitly reviewed as I was reading it years ago, and it lived on, thankfully, if only as a memory so that I could recommend it to a student to read and, yes, to review.

Ultimately, there is something hopeful about the book review, even the academic book review. There’s something hopeful in it because a review is always more than what it looks like: It can be what flashes before your eyes; it can be the practice that embodies the rituals of one’s profession, the habits that make one’s identity. The book review is central to what we do—and who we are. It is a relish worthy of savor, a form of communion that is as learned as it is precious.