Guidelines for Book Review

Due date:

Overview of the project:

You are required to write five to seven double-spaced (size 12 font, with 1" margins all around) proofread paper reviewing the book that you have chosen to read for this course this semester.   First provide a catchy intro and/or an overview of the major issues, how the book briefly relates to such issues, concluding with your evaluative thesis.  Then, after some preliminary information relating to the author and publication data, accurately describe the argument or point that the author is attempting to make, and the supporting lines of evidence he or she marshals for its defense. Evaluate the effort. Tie it into some other pieces of literature, relevant theory and research work. Integrate at least one published review of the book into your discussion. Make sure that you orient your review around some major point, or argument that you, the reviewer, want to make about the author's work and how it might fit into a broader literature or discipline. You should use at least two references, one of which can be your text, the other something from a professional journal (but nix on the newspaper and magazine articles) not mentioned by your text, as well as one published book review to integrate into your discussion (3 references altogether). Make copies of the review and append it to the back of your paper. Two possible sources for reviews are Contemporary Psychology and The New York Times Review of Books. Gail Stucky will undoubtedly have additional suggestions; ask her!

The review should include the following:

Provide first an enticing introduction, relevance to everyday life and/or scholarly discourse, finishing up with a clarification of the particular evaluative tack that you will take, the argument that you will be putting forth: in other words, your thesis relating to what the author tried to do and how well he/she succeeded (one-half to two-thirds of a page for this section)

Then identify the author, date, title, publisher, total pages, indexes, etc. A brief presentation of biographical information about the author — what sort of professional work she does (researcher in psychology? researcher in some related field? professional psychologist? science writer? etc.), where she does her work (which university, hospital or clinic, business, etc.), other kinds of relevant life experiences, etc. Emphasis should be placed on information that shows the qualifications of the author to write this book (one-half to one full page for this section)

Provide an overview of the area that the book addresses, then a summary of the major topics that are discussed in the book (another half page or so).   Then get into further discussion of one or a few themes that characterize the book and that you find especially interesting. In this section you should delve into the substance of the author’s arguments and evaluate why they are or are not persuasive. At the same time make reference to material from your textbook and your other sources that help place the author’s arguments in perspective. (four to five pages total for this section).

Finish up with a brief conclusion and a properly formatted (either the MLA or APA style) list of works cited, including at least the book you have read, our textbook, and additional sources (about one-half page for this section).

Please note that the paper must be five to seven typed, double-spaced pages in length. The bold-faced items in parentheses above suggest how to allocate this space among the various parts of the report. The final paper must have been carefully proofread so as to eliminate errors of spelling and grammar. Papers that are not spelling or grammatically ‘perfect’, e.g., punctuation, complete sentences, etc., will be returned and the student asked to resubmit corrected versions the following class period.