history of book reviews

Take a Journey Through 125 Years of Book Review History

By Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim March 15, 2021

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125 Years of The New York Times Book Review

By Tina Jordan and Noor Qasim

March 15, 2021

1896 On October 10, The Times published the first issue of the Book Review.

1905 Shortly before the publication of “The House of Mirth,” this portrait of Edith Wharton became the first photograph to appear on the cover of the Book Review.

1918 To illustrate the 1,562 books featured in spring publishing catalogues, the early Book Review employed an infographic.

1964 Shortly after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fourth book appeared on the cover of the Book Review.

1993 This summer reading issue was the first Book Review to appear in color.

2004 An iconic cover illustration by Milton Glaser featured the poet and songwriter Bob Dylan.

2020 In a year of great change, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reviewed former President Barack Obama’s memoir of his first four years in office.

This year, the Book Review turns 125.

It’s an institution that was born under the watchful eye of Adolph S. Ochs, who established the standalone supplement shortly after he became publisher of the paper in 1896. It has been known variously as “the Saturday Review of Books and Art,” “the Sunday Book Review,”“the NYTBR” or, mostly internally, simply “TBR” (not to be confused with “to be read,” though you can understand the confusion).

Yet as the Book Review has evolved, our country and world have evolved with it. Our pages reflect and reinterpret the happenings of the day, offering insight — and often, levity — through reviews, essays and news items. On occasion, we’ll miss something — T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” went unreviewed — but very often, history was made in our pages. We highlight here just a few of these moments, from landmark reviews to author scandals to moments of protest and recognition.

“The Fifty Best Books of 1896”

1897 The Book Review anointed J.M. Barrie’s “Sentimental Tommy” the No. 1 novel of 1896.

“Particularly poignant is the woman’s awakening as Mrs. Chopin tells it.”

1899 The Book Review recommended Kate Chopin’s novel “The Awakening” in its summer reading issue , calling it “clever” and “particularly poignant.”

1903 In “The Souls of Black Folk” — now widely accepted as a foundational text of American intellectual history — W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” In it, Du Bois also detailed his now-storied critique of Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on economic advancement.

Our review , which pitted Du Bois against Washington (whom it clearly favored), opened with this line: “It is generally conceded that Booker T. Washington represents the best hope of the negro in America.”

London At A Dog Dinner “‘Call of the Wild’s’ Author Attends Birthday Party of Fluffy Ruffles.”

1911 When Jack London attended the “elaborately decorated” birthday party of “a diminutive dog named Fluffy Ruffles” in Carmel-by-the-Sea, it was Page 2 news . “The table was covered with a white cloth of real damask, and London, the dog and other guests consumed lady fingers and lemonade with apparent relish,” the paper reported.

1912 In April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, killing around 1,500 people. A little over a month later, Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain — Lines on the Loss of the Titanic” appeared on the front page of The Times.

In the days that followed, readers began sending in their own poems, forcing the paper to issue a knuckle-rapping editorial : “If the hundreds and hundreds of people who have sent us verses about the loss of the Titanic will read with care those which THOMAS HARDY has written about it they may be moved to share our own wonder at the audacity they showed in attempting to deal with such a subject.”

1917 When asked by the Book Review to write an essay about literature in the trenches of World War I, Lt. Coningsby Dawson — a novelist in his civilian life — opened with the following observation: “There isn’t any. There isn’t any in the sense that people living in America would understand. The life that men lead in the trenches is greater literature than was ever penned.”

1925 When the American classic “The Great Gatsby” was published, our reviewer called F. Scott Fitzgerald “the philosopher of the flapper” and said the book was “a mystical, glamorous story of today.”

“Son, 6, Plans Revenge Poems on Milne When He Grows Up”

1926 Shortly after A. A. Milne introduced Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin to the world, one young reader was not so happy: his son, the original Christopher Robin, who threatened “to take revenge upon his dad by writing poems about him.”

1937 “Idaho: A Guide” was one of many such guides produced during the Great Depression under the direction of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration and reviewed by the Book Review. Writers like Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston found employment in this New Deal initiative at a time when there was little work elsewhere. The American Guides remain the only project of its kind in the country’s history, a comprehensive look at the nation’s then 48 states, as well as major cities and regions.

1939 Steinbeck’s Depression-era tale, “The Grapes of Wrath,” captured the desperate plight of migrant farm workers and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. “Californians are not going to like this angry novel,” our reviewer wrote . “The beauty and fertility of California conceal human fear, hatred and violence."

1946 The Book Review has always been interested in looking back. On our 50th anniversary , the reviewer and editor Charles Poore remarked, “The first issue of The New York Times Book Review, published 50 years ago this week, looks appropriately quaint: No doubt today’s anniversary issue will have certain aspects of antiquity 50 years from today — the coming uses of energized plutonium permitting interested survivors.”

“Nominally his book is about education at Yale. Actually it is about American politics.”

1951 The first book by William F. Buckley Jr., “God and Man at Yale,” was published to mixed notices, with McGeorge Bundy writing in The Atlantic, “I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory and a discredit to its author.” Our reviewer offered a more generous assessment : “Some day, being intelligent and earnest, Buckley may give us the hard-won wisdom of synthesis.”

1952 Wright Morris, reviewing “Invisible Man,” called Ralph Ellison a descendant of Virgil and Dante. “The geography of hell is still in the process of being mapped. The borders shift, the shore lines erode, coral islands appear complete with new sirens, but all the men who have been there speak with a similar voice.”

1953 For much of the early 20th century, coverage of female writers was fixated upon their ascendence — and the doom it seemed to forecast for the future of literature. In 1933, the Book Review’s editor, J. Donald Adams, wrote : “If the anti-feminists are right, the success of the woman’s movement ... may be justly regarded as one of the major tragedies in the history of mankind.”

Twenty years later, the Book Review was singing a different tune with the English publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” a major intellectual contribution that has gone on to inspire and influence much of the modern women’s movement. Our reviewer — a man — found it to be “a truly magnificent book, even if sometimes irritating to a mere male.”

1956/1959 Authors are no longer allowed mutual reviews, but in the 1950s two great writers were tasked with evaluating each other. They were mutually harsh but also sensitive to each other’s creative genius.

In his review of “Notes of a Native Son,” Langston Hughes wrote: “James Baldwin writes down to nobody, and he is trying very hard to write up to himself.” Baldwin opened his assessment of a selection of Hughes’ poems on an equally critical note: “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts — and depressed that he has done so little with them.”

1962 “ Silent Spring ,” Rachel Carson’s investigation into the use of pesticides, awakened readers to their insidious and destructive effects and helped spur the modern environmental movement. Our reviewers grasped the urgency of Carson’s contribution: “It is high time for people to know about these rapid changes in their environment, and to take an effective part in the battle that may shape the future of all life on earth.”

1968 “Because the summer of 1968 promises — or threatens — to be a critical one in American life,” wrote the Book Review on June 2 of that year, “prominent novelists and critics were asked to address themselves once more to the old but lively question of ‘engagement.’ Given the current divisions and dilemmas in our country, did they, as individuals or as craftsmen, expect to be spending the summer in any unusual (engaged) way?”

Many writers responded, including Malcolm Cowley, Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates. James Baldwin opened his note with this resounding message: “The black man’s continuing situation here is not an act of God. It has been willed into existence, and is perpetuated, by men.”

He closed it with another: “I have not talked about how this summer is likely to affect my writing life, because all of the summers I have spent in this country — or, for that matter, all of the winters — have been long and hazardous. I’m used to it. I intend to survive the summer because I am working on the screen version of ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ and hope to be shooting it, come the long, hard winter. When that’s done, we’ll see. For me, work is an act of love and an act of faith. And perhaps I hope, by working, to help save that country for which Thomas Jefferson trembled when he remembered that God was just.”

1977 “Welcome to the sexually liberated ’70s,” Rosalyn Drexler wrote in the Book Review. “Leave your clothes at the door and be prepared to have the time of your life; no role playing here, no jealousy, no boredom, no disease; if it feels good it is good!”

Alongside groundbreaking feminist texts such as Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics,” Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” and Shere Hite’s report on women’s sexual habits, “sexual liberation became big business.” Drexler added, “The ‘how to’ book, the ‘stroke’ book, the survey, and the vibrator are a direct result of the sexual revolution.”

“A unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America.”

1985 Isabel Allende published “ The House of the Spirits ,” which the Book Review called “spectacular.”

1987 “And the Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’s account of the origins and aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, was one of the first books to investigate the indifference and neglect of the American government and medical establishment.

In an interview with Gina Kolata, Shilts said that “any good reporter could have done this story … But I think the reason I did it, and no one else did, is because I am gay. It was happening to people I cared about and loved.”

1988 After “Beloved” did not win the National Book Award, the Book Review published a statement in Toni Morrison’s defense drafted by June Jordan and Houston A. Baker and signed by 48 Black writers, including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton and Angela Davis. “Your gifts to us have changed and made more gentle our real time together,” they wrote. “And so we write, here, hoping not to delay, not to arrive, in any way, late with this, our simple tribute to the seismic character and beauty of your writing.”

1989 When Salman Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accused him of slandering Islam in his novel and called for his death, and Muslim residents of two towns in the United Kingdom burned copies of the book. After Rushdie went into hiding, writers from around the world, including Chinua Achebe, Octavio Paz, Umberto Eco and Nadine Gordimer, sent their thoughts to the Book Review. As Ralph Ellison wrote: “Keep to your convictions. Try to protect yourself. A death sentence is a rather harsh review.”

1990 Wilfrid Sheed reviewed Peggy Noonan’s now-classic political memoir, writing that the speechwriter “does her level best for Ronald Reagan in this book. After a meeting at which he has manifestly woolgathered, but not without point, she triumphantly reports that ‘he had opinions, he had something he wanted to do’ — to which a voter can only respond weakly, ‘I should certainly hope so.’”

The Year of the Whopper: “In David Foster Wallace’s huge new novel, the calendar is sold to the highest corporate bidder.”

1996 Jay McInerney found David Foster Wallace’s novel “ Infinite Jest ” — which is more than 1,000 pages long — to be “alternately tedious and effulgent.”

2000 In an interview with Sarah Lyall shortly after the publication of “White Teeth,” Zadie Smith played down the significance of her highly lauded debut novel. “I have great ambitions of writing a very great book,” she said. “I just don’t think this is it.”

“A comic book for lovers of words!”

2006 At the publication of “Fun Home” — a graphic memoir that would later become the basis of a Tony Award-winning musical — our reviewer wrote , “If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, ‘Fun Home,’ must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced.”

2010 Lillian Ross wrote to the Book Review to contest an anecdote alluded to in a review of Nora Ephron’s book “I Remember Nothing”: “ The chapter describes a party at Ephron’s parents’ house in Los Angeles 60 years ago. According to Nora Ephron, I was brought to this party by the writer St. Clair McKelway and, after saying something that upset Phoebe Ephron, I was asked to leave. This story is a complete invention. I never went to a party at the Ephrons’ house, and I never went anywhere with St. Clair McKelway.”

Ephron’s response? “My book is about, among other things, the vagaries of memory. Lillian Ross’s memory of this event is different from my mother’s and mine.”

2010 Mark Twain’s autobiography was released 100 years after his death, just as he requested.

2012 Robert Caro, who has made the study of political power his life’s work, began his huge, multi-volume biography of the 36th president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1982 — and three decades later, Bill Clinton, the 42nd president reviewed the fourth installment for us, writing: “ Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.”

“Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize, Redefining Boundaries of Literature”

2016 Back in 1971, the Book Review declared that “Dylan is not a literary figure. Literature comes in books, and Dylan does not intend his most important work to be read.”

Listen to Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown read their poems

2020 At a moment of profound national protest — shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the poets Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown wrote poems for the Book Review.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife,” addresses the attack that maimed him  in 2022, and pays tribute to his wife who saw him through .

Recent books by Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts and Garrard Conley depict gay Christian characters not usually seen in queer literature.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? The writer Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward .

At 28, the poet Tayi Tibble has been hailed as the funny, fresh and immensely skilled voice of a generation in Māori writing .

Amid a surge in book bans, the most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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How to Write a History Book Review

Writing a book review is one of the fundamental skills that every historian must learn. An undergraduate student’s book review should accomplish two main goals:

• Lay out an author’s argument, and
• Most importantly, critique the historical argument.

It is important to remember that a book review is not a book report. You need to do more than simply lay out the contents or plot-line of a book. You may briefly summarize the historical narrative or contents but must focus your review on the historical argument being made and how effectively the author has supported this argument with historical evidence. If you can, you may also fit that argument into the wider historiography about the subject.

The 'How to ... ' of Historical Book Reviews Writing a book review may seem very difficult, but in fact there are some simple rules you can follow to make the process much easier.

Before you read, find out about the author’s prior work What academic discipline was the author trained in? What other books, articles, or conference papers has s/he written? How does this book relate to or follow from the previous work of the author? Has the author or this book won any awards? This information helps you understand the author’s argument and critique the book.

As you read, write notes for each of the following topics.

• Write a few sentences about the author’s approach or genre of history. Is the focus on gender? Class? Race? Politics? Culture? Labor? Law? Something else? A combination? If you can identify the type of history the historian has written, it will be easier to determine the historical argument the author is making.
• Summarize the author’s subject and argument. In a few sentences, describe the time period, major events, geographical scope and group or groups of people who are being investigated in the book. Why has the author chosen the starting and ending dates of the book’s narrative? Next, discover the major thesis or theses of the book, the argument(s) that the author makes and attempts to support with evidence. These are usually, but not always, presented in a book’s introduction. It might help to look for the major question that the author is attempting to answer and then try to write his or her answer to that question in a sentence or two. Sometimes there is a broad argument supported by a series of supporting arguments. It is not always easy to discern the main argument but this is the most important part of your book review.
• What is the structure of the book? Are the chapters organized chronologically, thematically, by group of historical actors, from general to specific, or in some other way? How does the structure of the work enhance or detract from the argument?
• Look closely at the kinds of evidence the author has used to prove the argument. Is the argument based on data, narrative, or both? Are narrative anecdotes the basis of the argument or do they supplement other evidence? Are there other kinds of evidence that the author should have included? Is the evidence convincing? If so, find a particularly supportive example and explain how it supports the author’s thesis. If not, give an example and explain what part of the argument is not supported by evidence. You may find that some evidence works, while some does not. Explain both sides, give examples, and let your readers know what you think overall.
• Closely related to the kinds of evidence are the kinds of sources the author uses. What different kinds of primary sources are used? What type of source is most important in the argument? Do these sources allow the author to adequately explore the subject? Are there important issues that the author cannot address based on these sources? How about the secondary sources? Are there one or more secondary books that the author seems to lean heavily on in support of the argument? Are there works that the author disagrees with in the text? This will tell the reader how the work fits into the historiography of the subject and whether it is presenting a major new interpretation.
• Is the argument convincing as a whole? Is there a particular place where it breaks down? Why? Is there a particular element that works best? Why? Would you recommend this book to others, and if so, for whom is it appropriate? General readers? Undergraduates? Graduates and specialists in this historical subject? Why? Would you put any qualifications on that recommendation?

After having written up your analyses of each of these topics, you are ready to compose your review. There is no one way to format a book review but here is a common format that can be varied according to what you think needs to be highlighted and what length is required.

• Introduce the author, the historical period and topic of the book. Tell the reader what genre of history this work belongs to or what approach the author has used. Set out the main argument.
• Summarize the book’s organization and give a little more detail about the author’s sub-arguments. Here you would also work in your assessment of the evidence and sources used.
• Strengths and weaknesses or flaws in the book are usually discussed next. It is up to you to decide in what order these should come, but if you assess the book positively overall, do not spend inordinate space on the book’s faults and vice versa.
• In the conclusion, you may state your recommendations for readership unless that has been covered in your discussion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. You might review how convincing the argument was, say something about the importance or uniqueness of the argument and topic, or describe how the author adds to our understanding of a particular historical question.

Book Reviews: A Tortured History

Why do lovers of literature take such joy in criticizing the critics?

Lamenting the state of the book review has been the literary world's favorite pastime ever since Edgar Allan Poe reviewed for Graham's Magazine in the 1840s. From Henry James to Heidi Julavitis, writers seem to delight in publishing manifestos that outline the book review's shortcomings and inadequacies.

One popular complaint is that book reviews are merely a byproduct of the publishing industry and therefore stink of mediocrity, elitism, nepotism, or all three. In 1846, Poe wrote that book reviews (and the publishing industry) were a sham and riddled with nepotism: "We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright." In 1917, H.L. Mencken bemoaned the "inconceivable complacency and conformity" of journalistic criticism. Forty years later, Elizabeth Hardwick echoed these sentiments when she said of reviewing, "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns."

Another criticism is that book reviews lack intelligence. In 1891, Henry James, the ultimate aesthete, complained that we publish too many reviews and none of value. Reviewing, James wrote, was all presumption and chatter and lacked "concrete literary fact"—that is specific references to and examples from the work reviewed. In his 1928 essay "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," Edmund Wilson wrote nearly the same thing: "It is astonishing to observe, in America, in spite of our floods of literary journalism, to what extent the literary atmosphere is a non-conductor of criticism." This line of criticism continues today: In 2007, Steve Wasserman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review , "The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers."

A recent trend amongst literary hipsters (and aging literary hipsters) is to whine that reviews are "too mean." This strand of book-review-griping emphasizes the need to protect and support "the artist." In 2005, the literary magazine N+1 protested against reviews published in The New Republic for being wholly negative . In 2001, Zadie Smith, formerly the New Books columnist for Harper's magazine, published a response to critic James Wood's a review of White Teeth in The Guardian , entitled "This is how it feels to be me" . In it, she asked critics to behave "more like teachers": "I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice." In a manic 2005 article on the "Teflon age of criticism," Heidi Julavitis veered off on many tangents—including a hagiography of the New York Intellectuals, a recap of the James Wood-Zadie Smith smackdown, a bit about movies and television, a defense of workshop fiction, an attack on anti-intellectualism, an awkward confession about her "intellectual crush" on James Wood (an anti-intellectual move in and of itself), and a declaration of her belief in literature's "intrinsic value"—before concluding that book reviews should never be mean and never, ever be "snarky."

But the problem with book reviews is not that they reek of mediocrity, elitism, or nepotism; aren't smart enough or are too pretentious; or are too negative or too positive. It's that they come from a source—a human being—and we sometimes fail to take that into account.

The other issue is that these sources aren't necessarily "experts" in the field of literature. Fiction and poetry reviews usually aren't written by literature professors or scholars; instead, they're written by freelance writers or columnists, some who are qualified and some who are not.

MORE ON BOOKS

But what makes someone qualified to review contemporary poetry and fiction? Contrary to what many people may think, these qualities aren't elusive or innate. In fact, the talents and abilities that a reviewer of poetry and fiction should possess are reflected in the techniques of some of our finest (deceased) journalistic literary critics from the past two hundred years: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and John Updike. None of these critics was "classically" trained in academe. Fuller was a populist and a Romantic in the German tradition who signed her reviews anonymously with an asterisk and believed that her purpose as literary editor of The New York Herald Tribune in the early 1840s was to promote reading as a form of self-culture and self-knowledge. Poe, the consummate outsider/insider, saw his reviews and his column in " The Literati of New York City " published in Godey's Lady's Book as an opportunity to expose the nepotism that was as rampant in the American publishing industry in the early 19 th century as it is today. (The column's subtitle was "Honest Opinions at Random Respecting their Autorial Merits, With Occasional Words of Personality.")

In the early 20th century, H.L. Mencken, editor of The Smart Set and American Mercury , despised the academic penchant for " Criticism of Criticism of Criticism ." He rose out of the smoke-filled dens of Baltimore newspapers and wrote book reviews that were all style and gusto. He attacked some books and advocated others. Mencken was salty, iconoclastic, and surprisingly blithe. (The New Critics would later pooh-pooh his refusal to take literature seriously.) The purpose of Mencken's reviews was as much to make an impression on the reader as it was to evaluate the book under discussion.

Edmund Wilson, who served alternately as a literary journalist or editor for Vanity Fair , The New Republic , and The New Yorker , reiterated James's criticisms of book reviews. He was against the schools of criticism but wrote historical reviews that analyzed and contextualized a work. Wilson set out to reveal the inner workings of a book and place it within literary history.

Elizabeth Hardwick approached criticism as a creative endeavor, a necessary complement to the world of art. In a 1985 interview published in The Paris Review , she said, "...[I]n reading books and planning to write about them, or maybe just in reading certain books, you begin to see all sorts of not quite expressed things the author may not have been entirely conscious of. It's a sort of creative or 'possessed' reading." In her reviews, Hardwick could be "snippy," but she was also loyal to the text and always dignified. She described book reviewing as "a natural response to the existence in the world of works of art. It is an honorable and even an exalted endeavor. Without it, works of art would appear in a vacuum, as if they had no relation to the minds experiencing them."

In general, John Updike favored the nice-guy approach to book reviewing, one that favored and coddled the author and limited the reviewer. He had a set of standards—his "rules" of reviewing —that clearly arose out of his experiences as an oft-reviewed author. They go something like this: 1) don't review books you have any personal connection to; 2) quote the book; 3) quote the book; 4) no spoilers; 5) quote the book; 6) review the book, not the author's reputation; 7) praise unsparingly; 8) leave tradition, schools of criticism, and political/social ideas out of it; 9) remember that books are meant to be enjoyed, 10) quote the book.

There are other journalistic literary critics—Van Wyck Brooks, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Cyril Connolly, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, and so many more—with insights and approaches worth studying. This is just a start. As we look to past book reviewers, we must also look around us. Too few newspapers and magazines employ regular book columnists and reviewers. This is done in the spirit of egalitarianism, but in the digital age, where anonymous, poorly written "customer reviews" sway readers, we need to establish relationships with our literary critics. We need to trust them as "experts" hired and trained by the publications that employ them or self-educated and trained as book bloggers or "amateur" reviewers with websites of their own. In either case, we can get to know the reviewer's tastes and tics and make a more informed decision about the book under review. In the present, mosh-pit of book reviewing, it's nearly impossible to know where the freelance literary critic you're reading is coming from. Including, perhaps, this one.

Reviews Guide

Reviewing books and other forms of scholarship—including films, public history sites and museums, document collections, digital projects, podcasts, and many other genres—is a primary responsibility of the American Historical Review .

The AHR carefully selects reviewers, ensuring that they have demonstrated sufficient expertise in the relevant field and guarding carefully against potential conflicts of interest. Scholars who have already reviewed a work for another journal should not then agree to review it for the AHR . Reviewers and potential reviewers should maintain the spirit of objectivity inherent in the review process. They should avoid making public statements, commentaries, or electronic media posts/discussions about a book they have agreed to review. Membership in the American Historical Association is neither a requirement for nor a guarantee of selection as a reviewer. We do not assign book reviews to scholars at their own suggestion; invitations to review are based on independent staff judgments about the appropriate match between material and reviewer. If you meet the above criteria and want to be added to our large and growing database of reviewers, please send a CV for consideration to [email protected].

As of 2023, the AHR no longer accepts print copies of books for review. Books reviewed in the AHR are selected from seasonal publisher catalogs. As an author, if you would like your book to be under consideration, please ensure your publisher has sent their latest catalog to [email protected] . Books listed in the catalog will be considered by our book review editors.

The AHR seeks to review genres of scholarship that make historical knowledge available to the discipline at large and the general public. We invite proposals for these kinds of reviews. All reviews are assigned in consultation with the Board of Editors and Associate Review Editors. Please note that suggesting a review does not guarantee that you will be chosen as the reviewer if a review is commissioned.

Such reviews can include, but are not limited to:

• Films 
• Public History projects
• Documentaries
• Video games
• Graphic histories
• Digital History

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HIST 5023: Historical Methods

• Book Reviews
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Historiography Tip

Literature Reviews or Review Essays can be paydirt for the historian. These journal articles often consist of a historiographci review of a number of works on a similar topic or theme.  

Try adding phrases such as "review essay" or "historiographical essay" to your search terms. Some example searches:

• slavery and "review essay" in America: History and Life
• historiograph* and folklore in JSTOR

Find Book Reviews

Many of our article databases have a way to limit your search to book reviews, even if they are not llisted below.

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Book History

Greg Barnhisel, Duquesne University; Beth le Roux, University of Pretoria; and Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology​

Journal Details

Contributions are accepted on a rolling basis. Articles should be submitted in electronic form as a Microsoft Word file, in Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface, double-spaced (including notes and citations), and documented in accordance with the  Chicago Manual of Style . All submissions will be subject to double-blind review: therefore, contact information (author’s name, telephone number, postal address, e-mail address) should be provided in the cover letter but should not appear anywhere in the article itself. 

Contributors are welcome to submit black-and-white illustrations and graphs with their texts. We also invite authors to include additional supplementary material to accompany their articles, such as color illustrations, web pages, database interfaces, slide decks, and/or videos; those will run in our companion publication  BHUnbound .

The desired length for submissions is 8–11,000 words, but shorter and longer articles will be considered. Due to space considerations, in the case of exceptionally long articles, the editors may choose to run the notes or appendices in  BHUnbound.  Articles may not be submitted to any other journal while they are under consideration at  Book History . 

Book History  now has a fully electronic system for processing submissions.  The submissions portal is here: mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bookhistory The editors of  Book History  award an annual Graduate Student Award, with a prize of $500, for the best essay in that year’s volume by an author who was pursuing a course of graduate studies at the time of initial submission. The winner of this prize is announced during SHARP’s yearly conference at the Annual General Meeting.

Queries concerning submissions should be sent directly to the editors: Greg Barnhisel ( [email protected] ) for articles dealing with the Americas; Beth le Roux ( [email protected] ) for articles dealing with Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), the Pacific, and global issues; and Yuri Cowan ( [email protected] ) for articles dealing with Europe.

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Book History,  an official publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), accepts submissions of original, researched scholarly articles focused on issues in the history of the book, print or manuscript culture, authorship, and reading. We do not publish informal articles or reviews. Articles should not be merely case studies; they must contribute to a larger debate or comment on a broader question in the field and show a familiarity with current scholarship. The desired length for submissions is 8–11,000 words, but shorter and longer articles will be considered. Due to space considerations, in the case of exceptionally long articles, the editors may choose to run the notes or appendices in  BHUnbound.  We do not accept simultaneous submissions. We do not consider translations of articles that have been previously published in other languages; for those types of submissions, please consider  Book History ’s sister publication  Lingua Franca.  

Book History uses double-blind peer review. Authors submit their piece through the ScholarOne portal to the editor responsible for the article’s area (for Europe, Yuri Cowan; for the Americas, Greg Barnhisel; for Africa, Oceania, Asia, and “State of the Discipline” pieces, Beth LeRoux), and upon initial submission all editors read the article and vote on whether it should be sent out for review. Having passed preliminary editorial review, all articles are sent to expert peer reviewers in a double-blind process (reviewers do not know the identity of the author, and the author is not informed of the identity of the reviewers), although authors are asked to provide names of possible reviewers. Reviewers return their reports within 4-6 weeks recommending acceptance, revision, or rejection. The reviews are advisory and the editors reserve the right not to follow a reviewer’s recommendation or even to find another reviewer if they deem a given review unacceptable. Authors have three months to revise and resubmit their articles but extensions can be given.

Criteria for review, both by the editors and the reviewers, are:

• Relevance, originality, plausibility, strength of the argument
• Contribution of the article to an ongoing topic in the field
• Quality of the research and engagement with other scholarship on the topic
• Quality of the writing and organization of the article

Greg Barnhisel , Duquesne University Beth le Roux , University of Pretoria Yuri Cowan , Norwegian University of Science and Technology​

Advisory Editors

Guyda Armstrong, University of Manchester Jan-Pieter Barbian,  Duisburg Public Library Ann M. Blair,  Harvard University Cynthia Brokaw,  Brown University Sarah Brouillette,  Carleton University Matthew P. Brown,  University of Iowa Center for the Book Archie Dick,  University of Pretoria Paul Eggert,  Loyola University Chicago and University of New South Wales Aileen Fyfe,  University of St. Andrews Anindita Ghosh,  University of Manchester Lisa Gitelman,  New York University   Robert Gross,  University of Connecticut (Emeritus) Faye Hammill,  University of Glasgow Barbara Hochman,  Ben-Gurion University (Emerita) Shamil Jeppie,  University of Cape Town William A. Johnson,  Duke University Joan Judge,  York University Andrew T. Kamei-Dyche,  Aoyama Gakuin University Matthew Kirschenbaum,  University of Maryland Alisha R. Knight,  Washington College Cheryl Knott,  University of Arizona Keith Manley,  Exeter, UK Elizabeth McHenry,  New York University Alicia C. Montoya,  Radboud University Nijmegen Eva Mroczek,  University of California, Davis Simone Murray,  Monash University Brigitte Ouvry-Vial , Le Mans Université and Institut Universitaire de France Ruth Panofsky,  Ryerson University Birgitte Beck Pristed,  Aarhus University Benito Rial Costas,  Universidad Complutense de Madrid Dagmar A. Riedel,  Columbia University Jiřina Šmejkalová,  Charles University and Palacký University Lisa Z. Sigel,  DePaul University Erin A. Smith,  University of Texas at Dallas Robert Spoo,  University of Tulsa College of Law Andrew Thacker,  Nottingham Trent University Michele Troy,  Hillyer College—University of Hartford  Alexis Weedon,  University of Bedfordshire

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Emerging Sources Citation Index
• Web of Science
• Academic Search Alumni Edition, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Academic Search Complete, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Academic Search Elite, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Academic Search Premier, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Academic Search Ultimate, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• America: History and Life, 9/1/1998-
• Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.9, 2006-vol.10, 2007
• Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), Jan.2006-
• Current Abstracts, 1/1/2003-
• Historical Abstracts (Online), 9/1/1998-
• Humanities International Complete, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Humanities International Index, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Humanities Source, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Library & Information Science Source, 1/1/2006-11/1/2011
• Library Literature & Information Science Full Text (H.W. Wilson), 01/01/2006-
• Library Literature & Information Science Index (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/2006-11/1/2011
• Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA), 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Literary Reference Center, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• Literary Reference Center Plus, 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/2006-11/1/2011
• OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/2006-11/1/2011
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/2003-12/31/2009
• ArticleFirst, vol.1, no.1, 1998-vol.12, no.1, 2009
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.1, no.1, 1998-vol.12, no.1, 2009
• Library Literature, vol.9, 2006-vol.13, 2010

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.2 (2022) 0.5 (Five-Year Impact Factor) 0.00044 (Eigenfactor™ Score) Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor): Note: While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.  

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Also of Interest

Ramesh Mallipeddi, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Deborah McGrady, University of Virginia

Katherine Malone, South Dakota State University

Kristina M. Olson, George Mason University

Peter Kirwan, Mary Baldwin University

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The Ten Best History Books of 2020

Our favorite titles of the year resurrect forgotten histories and help explain how the country got to where it is today

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

In a year marked by a devastating pandemic, a vitriolic presidential race and an ongoing reckoning with systemic racism in the United States, these ten titles served a dual purpose. Some offered a respite from reality, transporting readers to such varied locales as Tudor England, colonial America and ancient Jerusalem; others reflected on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past informs its present and future. From an irreverent biography of George Washington to a sweeping overview of 20th-century American immigration , these were some of our favorite history books of 2020.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In this “ Oprah’s Book Club” pick , Isabel Wilkerson presents a compelling argument for shifting the language used to describe how black Americans are treated by their country. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author tells NPR , “racism” is an insufficient term for the country’s ingrained inequality. A more accurate characterization is “ caste system ”—a phrase that better encapsulates the hierarchical nature of American society. 

Drawing parallels between the United States, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson identifies the “ eight pillars ” that uphold caste systems: Among others, the list includes divine will, heredity, dehumanization, terror-derived enforcement and occupational hierarchies. Dividing people into categories ensures that those in the middle rung have an “inferior” group to compare themselves to, the author writes, and maintains a status quo with tangible ramifications for public health, culture and politics. “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson explains. “It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer

When the Nazis bombed Bari, a Mediterranean port city central to the Allied war effort, on December 2, 1943, hundreds of sailors sustained horrific injuries. Within days of the attack, writes Jennet Conant in The Great Secret , the wounded started exhibiting unexpected symptoms , including blisters “as big as balloons and heavy with fluid,” in the words of British nurse Gwladys Rees, and intense eye pain. “We began to realize that most of our patients had been contaminated by something beyond all imagination,” Rees later recalled.

American medical officer Stewart Francis Alexander, who’d been called in to investigate the mysterious maladies, soon realized that the sailors had been exposed to mustard gas. Allied leaders were quick to place the blame on the Germans, but Alexander found concrete evidence sourcing the contamination to an Allied shipment of mustard gas struck during the bombing. Though the military covered up its role in the disaster for decades, the attack had at least one positive outcome: While treating patients, Alexander learned that mustard gas rapidly destroyed victims’ blood cells and lymph nodes—a phenomenon with wide-ranging ramifications for cancer treatment. The first chemotherapy based on nitrogen mustard was approved in 1949, and several drugs based on Alexander’s research remain in use today.

Read an excerpt from The Great Secret that ran in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine .

Uncrowned Queen: The Life of Margaret Beaufort, Mother of the Tudors

Though she never officially held the title of queen, Margaret Beaufort , Countess of Richmond, fulfilled the role in all but name, orchestrating the Tudor family’s rise to power and overseeing the machinations of government upon her son Henry VII ’s ascension. In Uncrowned Queen , Nicola Tallis charts the complex web of operations behind Margaret’s unlikely victory, detailing her role in the Wars of the Roses —a dynastic clash between the Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the royal Plantagenet family—and efforts to win Henry, then in exile as one of the last Lancastrian heirs, the throne. Ultimately, Margaret emerges as a more well-rounded figure, highly ambitious and determined but not, as she’s commonly characterized, to the point of being a power-hungry religious zealot. 

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

Accounts of George Washington’s life tend to lionize the Founding Father, depicting him as a “marble Adonis … rather than as a flawed, but still impressive, human being,” according to Karin Wulf of Smithsonian magazine . You Never Forget Your First adopts a different approach: As historian Alexis Coe told Wulf earlier this year, “I don’t feel a need to protect Washington; he doesn’t need me to come to his defense, and I don’t think he needed his past biographers to, either, but they’re so worried about him. I’m not worried about him. He’s everywhere. He’s just fine.” Treating the first president’s masculinity as a “foregone conclusion,” Coe explores lesser-known aspects of Washington’s life, from his interest in animal husbandry to his role as a father figure . Her pithy, 304-page biography also interrogates Washington’s status as a slaveholder, pointing out that his much-publicized efforts to pave the way for emancipation were “mostly legacy building,” not the result of strongly held convictions. 

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

Nine years after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code popularized the theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, Harvard historian Karen L. King announced the discovery of a 1,600-year-old papyrus that seemingly supported the novel’s much-maligned premise. The 2012 find was an instant sensation, dividing scholars, the press and the public into camps of non-believers who dismissed it as a forgery and defenders who interpreted it as a refutation of longstanding ideals of Christian celibacy. For a time, the debate appeared to be at an impasse. Then, journalist Ariel Sabar —who’d previously reported on the fragment for Smithsonian —published a piece in the Atlantic that called the authenticity of King’s “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” into question. Shortly after, King publicly stated that the papyrus was probably a forgery .

Veritas presents the full story of Sabar’s seven-year investigation for the first time, drawing on more than 450 interviews, thousands of documents, and trips around the world to reveal the fascinating figures behind the forgery: an amateur Egyptologist–turned–pornographer and a scholar whose “ideological commitments” guided her practice of history. Ultimately, Sabar concludes, King viewed the papyrus “as a fiction that advanced a truth”: namely, that women and sexuality played a larger role in early Christianity than previously acknowledged.

The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President's Black Family

Bettye Kearse ’s mother had long viewed her family’s ties to President James Madison as a point of pride. “Always remember—you’re a Madison,” she told her daughter. “You come from African slaves and a president.” (According to family tradition, as passed down by generations of griot oral historians, Madison raped his enslaved half-sister, Coreen, who gave birth to a son—Kearse’s great-great-great-grandfather—around 1792.) Kearse, however, was unable to separate her DNA from the “humiliation, uncertainty, and physical and emotional harm” experienced by her enslaved ancestor. 

To come to terms with this violent past, the retired pediatrician spent 30 years investigating both her own family history and that of other enslaved and free African Americans whose voices have been silenced over the centuries. Though Kearse lacks conclusive DNA or documentary evidence proving her links to Madison, she hasn’t let this upend her sense of identity. “The problem is not DNA,” the author writes on her website . “... [T]he problem is the Constitution,” which “set the precedent for the exclusion of [enslaved individuals] from historical records.” 

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

While Union forces fought to end slavery in the American South, a smaller cadre of soldiers waged war in the West, battling pro-secessionist troops for control of the resource-rich Arizona and New Mexico Territories . The campaign essentially ended in late 1862, when the U.S. Army pushed Confederate forces back into Texas, but as Megan Kate Nelson writes in The Three-Cornered War , another battle—this time, between the United States and the region’s Apache and Navajo communities—was just beginning. Told through the lens of nine key players, including Apache leader Mangas Coloradas, Texas legislator John R. Baylor and Navajo weaver Juanita, Nelson’s account underscores the brutal nature of westward expansion, from the U.S. Army’s scorched-earth strategy to its unsavory treatment of defeated soldiers . Per Publishers Weekly , Nelson deftly argues that the United States’ priorities were twofold, including “both the emancipation of [slavery] and the elimination of indigenous tribes.” 

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , a eugenics-inspired measure that drastically limited immigration into the U.S. Controversial from its inception, the law favored immigrants from northern and Western Europe while essentially cutting off all immigration from Asia. Decisive legislation reversing the act only arrived in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson (no relation), capitalizing on a brief moment of national unity sparked by predecessor John F. Kennedy’s assassination, signed the Hart-Celler Act —a measure that eliminated quotas and prioritized family unification—into law. 

Jia Lynn Yang ’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide artfully examines the impact of decades of xenophobic policy, spotlighting the politicians who celebrated America’s status as a nation of immigrants and fought for a more open and inclusive immigration policy. As Yang, a deputy national editor at the New York Times , told Smithsonian ’s Anna Diamond earlier this year, “The really interesting political turn in the '50s is to bring immigrants into this idea of American nationalism. It’s not that immigrants make America less special. It’s that immigrants are what make America special.”

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Les Payne died of a heart attack in 2018, his daughter, Tamara, stepped in to complete his unfinished biography of civil rights leader Malcolm X. Upon its release two years later, the 500-page tome garnered an array of accolades, including a spot on the 2020 National Book Awards shortlist. Based on 28 years of research, including hundreds of interviews with Malcolm’s friends, family acquaintances, allies and enemies, The Dead Are Arising reflects the elder Payne’s dedication to tirelessly teasing out the truth behind what he described as the much-mythologized figure’s journey “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.” The result, writes Publishers Weekly in its review, is a “richly detailed account” that paints “an extraordinary and essential portrait of the man behind the icon.”

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom

In this dual biography, H.W. Brands seeks to address an age-old question : “What does a good man do when his country commits a great evil?” Drawing on two prominent figures in Civil War history as case studies, the historian outlines differing approaches to the abolition of slavery, juxtaposing John Brown’s “violent extremism” with Abraham Lincoln’s “coolheaded incrementalism,” as Alexis Coe writes in the Washington Post ’s review of The Zealot and the Emancipator . Ultimately, Brands tells NPR , lasting change requires both “the conscience of people like John Brown” (ideally with an understanding that one can take these convictions too far) and “the pragmatism and the steady hand of the politician—the pragmatists like Lincoln.”

Having trouble seeing our list of books? Turn off your ad blocker and you'll be all set. For more recommendations, check out The Best Books of 2020 .

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Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.

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Blog – Posted on Friday, Mar 29

17 book review examples to help you write the perfect review.

It’s an exciting time to be a book reviewer. Once confined to print newspapers and journals, reviews now dot many corridors of the Internet — forever helping others discover their next great read. That said, every book reviewer will face a familiar panic: how can you do justice to a great book in just a thousand words?

As you know, the best way to learn how to do something is by immersing yourself in it. Luckily, the Internet (i.e. Goodreads and other review sites , in particular) has made book reviews more accessible than ever — which means that there are a lot of book reviews examples out there for you to view!

In this post, we compiled 17 prototypical book review examples in multiple genres to help you figure out how to write the perfect review . If you want to jump straight to the examples, you can skip the next section. Otherwise, let’s first check out what makes up a good review.

Are you interested in becoming a book reviewer? We recommend you check out Reedsy Discovery , where you can earn money for writing reviews — and are guaranteed people will read your reviews! To register as a book reviewer, sign up here.

Pro-tip : But wait! How are you sure if you should become a book reviewer in the first place? If you're on the fence, or curious about your match with a book reviewing career, take our quick quiz:

Should you become a book reviewer?

Find out the answer. Takes 30 seconds!

What must a book review contain?

Like all works of art, no two book reviews will be identical. But fear not: there are a few guidelines for any aspiring book reviewer to follow. Most book reviews, for instance, are less than 1,500 words long, with the sweet spot hitting somewhere around the 1,000-word mark. (However, this may vary depending on the platform on which you’re writing, as we’ll see later.)

In addition, all reviews share some universal elements, as shown in our book review templates . These include:

• A review will offer a concise plot summary of the book. 
• A book review will offer an evaluation of the work. 
• A book review will offer a recommendation for the audience. 

If these are the basic ingredients that make up a book review, it’s the tone and style with which the book reviewer writes that brings the extra panache. This will differ from platform to platform, of course. A book review on Goodreads, for instance, will be much more informal and personal than a book review on Kirkus Reviews, as it is catering to a different audience. However, at the end of the day, the goal of all book reviews is to give the audience the tools to determine whether or not they’d like to read the book themselves.

Keeping that in mind, let’s proceed to some book review examples to put all of this in action.

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Book review examples for fiction books

Since story is king in the world of fiction, it probably won’t come as any surprise to learn that a book review for a novel will concentrate on how well the story was told .

That said, book reviews in all genres follow the same basic formula that we discussed earlier. In these examples, you’ll be able to see how book reviewers on different platforms expertly intertwine the plot summary and their personal opinions of the book to produce a clear, informative, and concise review.

Note: Some of the book review examples run very long. If a book review is truncated in this post, we’ve indicated by including a […] at the end, but you can always read the entire review if you click on the link provided.

Examples of literary fiction book reviews

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man :

An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.

His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.

This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.

Lyndsey reviews George Orwell’s 1984 on Goodreads:

YOU. ARE. THE. DEAD. Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. Or in Newspeak "Double Plus Good." Let me preface this with an apology. If I sound stunningly inarticulate at times in this review, I can't help it. My mind is completely fried.

This book is like the dystopian Lord of the Rings, with its richly developed culture and economics, not to mention a fully developed language called Newspeak, or rather more of the anti-language, whose purpose is to limit speech and understanding instead of to enhance and expand it. The world-building is so fully fleshed out and spine-tinglingly terrifying that it's almost as if George travelled to such a place, escaped from it, and then just wrote it all down.

I read Fahrenheit 451 over ten years ago in my early teens. At the time, I remember really wanting to read 1984, although I never managed to get my hands on it. I'm almost glad I didn't. Though I would not have admitted it at the time, it would have gone over my head. Or at the very least, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it fully. […]

The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry :

Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.

The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.

Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years. […]

Emily W. Thompson reviews Michael Doane's The Crossing on Reedsy Discovery :

In Doane’s debut novel, a young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results.

An unnamed protagonist (The Narrator) is dealing with heartbreak. His love, determined to see the world, sets out for Portland, Oregon. But he’s a small-town boy who hasn’t traveled much. So, the Narrator mourns her loss and hides from life, throwing himself into rehabbing an old motorcycle. Until one day, he takes a leap; he packs his bike and a few belongings and heads out to find the Girl.

Following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat-Moon, Doane offers a coming of age story about a man finding himself on the backroads of America. Doane’s a gifted writer with fluid prose and insightful observations, using The Narrator’s personal interactions to illuminate the diversity of the United States.

The Narrator initially sticks to the highways, trying to make it to the West Coast as quickly as possible. But a hitchhiker named Duke convinces him to get off the beaten path and enjoy the ride. “There’s not a place that’s like any other,” [39] Dukes contends, and The Narrator realizes he’s right. Suddenly, the trip is about the journey, not just the destination. The Narrator ditches his truck and traverses the deserts and mountains on his bike. He destroys his phone, cutting off ties with his past and living only in the moment.

As he crosses the country, The Narrator connects with several unique personalities whose experiences and views deeply impact his own. Duke, the complicated cowboy and drifter, who opens The Narrator’s eyes to a larger world. Zooey, the waitress in Colorado who opens his heart and reminds him that love can be found in this big world. And Rosie, The Narrator’s sweet landlady in Portland, who helps piece him back together both physically and emotionally.

This supporting cast of characters is excellent. Duke, in particular, is wonderfully nuanced and complicated. He’s a throwback to another time, a man without a cell phone who reads Sartre and sleeps under the stars. Yet he’s also a grifter with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude that harms those around him. It’s fascinating to watch The Narrator wrestle with Duke’s behavior, trying to determine which to model and which to discard.

Doane creates a relatable protagonist in The Narrator, whose personal growth doesn’t erase his faults. His willingness to hit the road with few resources is admirable, and he’s prescient enough to recognize the jealousy of those who cannot or will not take the leap. His encounters with new foods, places, and people broaden his horizons. Yet his immaturity and selfishness persist. He tells Rosie she’s been a good mother to him but chooses to ignore the continuing concern from his own parents as he effectively disappears from his old life.

Despite his flaws, it’s a pleasure to accompany The Narrator on his physical and emotional journey. The unexpected ending is a fitting denouement to an epic and memorable road trip.

The Book Smugglers review Anissa Gray’s The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls :

I am still dipping my toes into the literally fiction pool, finding what works for me and what doesn’t. Books like The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray are definitely my cup of tea.

Althea and Proctor Cochran had been pillars of their economically disadvantaged community for years – with their local restaurant/small market and their charity drives. Until they are found guilty of fraud for stealing and keeping most of the money they raised and sent to jail. Now disgraced, their entire family is suffering the consequences, specially their twin teenage daughters Baby Vi and Kim.  To complicate matters even more: Kim was actually the one to call the police on her parents after yet another fight with her mother. […]

Examples of children’s and YA fiction book reviews

The Book Hookup reviews Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give :

♥ Quick Thoughts and Rating: 5 stars! I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to tackle the voice of a movement like Black Lives Matter, but I do know that Thomas did it with a finesse only a talented author like herself possibly could. With an unapologetically realistic delivery packed with emotion, The Hate U Give is a crucially important portrayal of the difficulties minorities face in our country every single day. I have no doubt that this book will be met with resistance by some (possibly many) and slapped with a “controversial” label, but if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to walk in a POC’s shoes, then I feel like this is an unflinchingly honest place to start.

In Angie Thomas’s debut novel, Starr Carter bursts on to the YA scene with both heart-wrecking and heartwarming sincerity. This author is definitely one to watch.

♥ Review: The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me both eager to get my hands on it and terrified to read it. I mean, what if I was to be the one person that didn’t love it as much as others? (That seems silly now because of how truly mesmerizing THUG was in the most heartbreakingly realistic way.) However, with the relevancy of its summary in regards to the unjust predicaments POC currently face in the US, I knew this one was a must-read, so I was ready to set my fears aside and dive in. That said, I had an altogether more personal, ulterior motive for wanting to read this book. […]

The New York Times reviews Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood :

Alice Crewe (a last name she’s chosen for herself) is a fairy tale legacy: the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine, author of a collection of dark-as-night fairy tales called “Tales From the Hinterland.” The book has a cult following, and though Alice has never met her grandmother, she’s learned a little about her through internet research. She hasn’t read the stories, because her mother, Ella Proserpine, forbids it.

Alice and Ella have moved from place to place in an attempt to avoid the “bad luck” that seems to follow them. Weird things have happened. As a child, Alice was kidnapped by a man who took her on a road trip to find her grandmother; he was stopped by the police before they did so. When at 17 she sees that man again, unchanged despite the years, Alice panics. Then Ella goes missing, and Alice turns to Ellery Finch, a schoolmate who’s an Althea Proserpine superfan, for help in tracking down her mother. Not only has Finch read every fairy tale in the collection, but handily, he remembers them, sharing them with Alice as they journey to the mysterious Hazel Wood, the estate of her now-dead grandmother, where they hope to find Ella.

“The Hazel Wood” starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. (The fairy stories Finch relays, which Albert includes as their own chapters, are as creepy and evocative as you’d hope.) Albert seamlessly combines contemporary realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that highlights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth and the world as it appears is false, where just about anything can happen, particularly in the pages of a very good book. It’s a captivating debut. […]

James reviews Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight, Moon on Goodreads:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is one of the books that followers of my blog voted as a must-read for our Children's Book August 2018 Readathon. Come check it out and join the next few weeks!

This picture book was such a delight. I hadn't remembered reading it when I was a child, but it might have been read to me... either way, it was like a whole new experience! It's always so difficult to convince a child to fall asleep at night. I don't have kids, but I do have a 5-month-old puppy who whines for 5 minutes every night when he goes in his cage/crate (hopefully he'll be fully housebroken soon so he can roam around when he wants). I can only imagine! I babysat a lot as a teenager and I have tons of younger cousins, nieces, and nephews, so I've been through it before, too. This was a believable experience, and it really helps show kids how to relax and just let go when it's time to sleep.

The bunny's are adorable. The rhymes are exquisite. I found it pretty fun, but possibly a little dated given many of those things aren't normal routines anymore. But the lessons to take from it are still powerful. Loved it! I want to sample some more books by this fine author and her illustrators.

Publishers Weekly reviews Elizabeth Lilly’s Geraldine :

This funny, thoroughly accomplished debut opens with two words: “I’m moving.” They’re spoken by the title character while she swoons across her family’s ottoman, and because Geraldine is a giraffe, her full-on melancholy mode is quite a spectacle. But while Geraldine may be a drama queen (even her mother says so), it won’t take readers long to warm up to her. The move takes Geraldine from Giraffe City, where everyone is like her, to a new school, where everyone else is human. Suddenly, the former extrovert becomes “That Giraffe Girl,” and all she wants to do is hide, which is pretty much impossible. “Even my voice tries to hide,” she says, in the book’s most poignant moment. “It’s gotten quiet and whispery.” Then she meets Cassie, who, though human, is also an outlier (“I’m that girl who wears glasses and likes MATH and always organizes her food”), and things begin to look up.

Lilly’s watercolor-and-ink drawings are as vividly comic and emotionally astute as her writing; just when readers think there are no more ways for Geraldine to contort her long neck, this highly promising talent comes up with something new.

Examples of genre fiction book reviews

Karlyn P reviews Nora Roberts’ Dark Witch , a paranormal romance novel , on Goodreads:

4 stars. Great world-building, weak romance, but still worth the read.

I hesitate to describe this book as a 'romance' novel simply because the book spent little time actually exploring the romance between Iona and Boyle. Sure, there IS a romance in this novel. Sprinkled throughout the book are a few scenes where Iona and Boyle meet, chat, wink at each, flirt some more, sleep together, have a misunderstanding, make up, and then profess their undying love. Very formulaic stuff, and all woven around the more important parts of this book.

The meat of this book is far more focused on the story of the Dark witch and her magically-gifted descendants living in Ireland. Despite being weak on the romance, I really enjoyed it. I think the book is probably better for it, because the romance itself was pretty lackluster stuff.

I absolutely plan to stick with this series as I enjoyed the world building, loved the Ireland setting, and was intrigued by all of the secondary characters. However, If you read Nora Roberts strictly for the romance scenes, this one might disappoint. But if you enjoy a solid background story with some dark magic and prophesies, you might enjoy it as much as I did.

I listened to this one on audio, and felt the narration was excellent.

Emily May reviews R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy Wars , an epic fantasy novel , on Goodreads:

“But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain.”

Holy hell, what did I just read??

➽ A fantasy military school

➽ A rich world based on modern Chinese history

➽ Shamans and gods

➽ Detailed characterization leading to unforgettable characters

➽ Adorable, opium-smoking mentors

That's a basic list, but this book is all of that and SO MUCH MORE. I know 100% that The Poppy War will be one of my best reads of 2018.

Isn't it just so great when you find one of those books that completely drags you in, makes you fall in love with the characters, and demands that you sit on the edge of your seat for every horrific, nail-biting moment of it? This is one of those books for me. And I must issue a serious content warning: this book explores some very dark themes. Proceed with caution (or not at all) if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of war, drug use and addiction, genocide, racism, sexism, ableism, self-harm, torture, and rape (off-page but extremely horrific).

Because, despite the fairly innocuous first 200 pages, the title speaks the truth: this is a book about war. All of its horrors and atrocities. It is not sugar-coated, and it is often graphic. The "poppy" aspect refers to opium, which is a big part of this book. It is a fantasy, but the book draws inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking.

Crime Fiction Lover reviews Jessica Barry’s Freefall , a crime novel:

In some crime novels, the wrongdoing hits you between the eyes from page one. With others it’s a more subtle process, and that’s OK too. So where does Freefall fit into the sliding scale?

In truth, it’s not clear. This is a novel with a thrilling concept at its core. A woman survives plane crash, then runs for her life. However, it is the subtleties at play that will draw you in like a spider beckoning to an unwitting fly.

Like the heroine in Sharon Bolton’s Dead Woman Walking, Allison is lucky to be alive. She was the only passenger in a private plane, belonging to her fiancé, Ben, who was piloting the expensive aircraft, when it came down in woodlands in the Colorado Rockies. Ally is also the only survivor, but rather than sitting back and waiting for rescue, she is soon pulling together items that may help her survive a little longer – first aid kit, energy bars, warm clothes, trainers – before fleeing the scene. If you’re hearing the faint sound of alarm bells ringing, get used to it. There’s much, much more to learn about Ally before this tale is over.

Kirkus Reviews reviews Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One , a science-fiction novel :

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles.

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three.

Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Book review examples for non-fiction books

Nonfiction books are generally written to inform readers about a certain topic. As such, the focus of a nonfiction book review will be on the clarity and effectiveness of this communication . In carrying this out, a book review may analyze the author’s source materials and assess the thesis in order to determine whether or not the book meets expectations.

Again, we’ve included abbreviated versions of long reviews here, so feel free to click on the link to read the entire piece!

The Washington Post reviews David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon :

The arc of David Grann’s career reminds one of a software whiz-kid or a latest-thing talk-show host — certainly not an investigative reporter, even if he is one of the best in the business. The newly released movie of his first book, “The Lost City of Z,” is generating all kinds of Oscar talk, and now comes the release of his second book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” the film rights to which have already been sold for $5 million in what one industry journal called the “biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory.”

Grann deserves the attention. He’s canny about the stories he chases, he’s willing to go anywhere to chase them, and he’s a maestro in his ability to parcel out information at just the right clip: a hint here, a shading of meaning there, a smartly paced buildup of multiple possibilities followed by an inevitable reversal of readerly expectations or, in some cases, by a thrilling and dislocating pull of the entire narrative rug.

All of these strengths are on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Around the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage lands in the Oklahoma Territory, lands that were soon to become part of the state of Oklahoma. Through foresight and legal maneuvering, the Osage found a way to permanently attach that oil to themselves and shield it from the prying hands of white interlopers; this mechanism was known as “headrights,” which forbade the outright sale of oil rights and granted each full member of the tribe — and, supposedly, no one else — a share in the proceeds from any lease arrangement. For a while, the fail-safes did their job, and the Osage got rich — diamond-ring and chauffeured-car and imported-French-fashion rich — following which quite a large group of white men started to work like devils to separate the Osage from their money. And soon enough, and predictably enough, this work involved murder. Here in Jazz Age America’s most isolated of locales, dozens or even hundreds of Osage in possession of great fortunes — and of the potential for even greater fortunes in the future — were dispatched by poison, by gunshot and by dynamite. […]

Stacked Books reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers :

I’ve heard a lot of great things about Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. Friends and co-workers tell me that his subjects are interesting and his writing style is easy to follow without talking down to the reader. I wasn’t disappointed with Outliers. In it, Gladwell tackles the subject of success – how people obtain it and what contributes to extraordinary success as opposed to everyday success.

The thesis – that our success depends much more on circumstances out of our control than any effort we put forth – isn’t exactly revolutionary. Most of us know it to be true. However, I don’t think I’m lying when I say that most of us also believe that we if we just try that much harder and develop our talent that much further, it will be enough to become wildly successful, despite bad or just mediocre beginnings. Not so, says Gladwell.

Most of the evidence Gladwell gives us is anecdotal, which is my favorite kind to read. I can’t really speak to how scientifically valid it is, but it sure makes for engrossing listening. For example, did you know that successful hockey players are almost all born in January, February, or March? Kids born during these months are older than the others kids when they start playing in the youth leagues, which means they’re already better at the game (because they’re bigger). Thus, they get more play time, which means their skill increases at a faster rate, and it compounds as time goes by. Within a few years, they’re much, much better than the kids born just a few months later in the year. Basically, these kids’ birthdates are a huge factor in their success as adults – and it’s nothing they can do anything about. If anyone could make hockey interesting to a Texan who only grudgingly admits the sport even exists, it’s Gladwell. […]

Quill and Quire reviews Rick Prashaw’s Soar, Adam, Soar :

Ten years ago, I read a book called Almost Perfect. The young-adult novel by Brian Katcher won some awards and was held up as a powerful, nuanced portrayal of a young trans person. But the reality did not live up to the book’s billing. Instead, it turned out to be a one-dimensional and highly fetishized portrait of a trans person’s life, one that was nevertheless repeatedly dubbed “realistic” and “affecting” by non-transgender readers possessing only a vague, mass-market understanding of trans experiences.

In the intervening decade, trans narratives have emerged further into the literary spotlight, but those authored by trans people ourselves – and by trans men in particular – have seemed to fall under the shadow of cisgender sensationalized imaginings. Two current Canadian releases – Soar, Adam, Soar and This One Looks Like a Boy – provide a pointed object lesson into why trans-authored work about transgender experiences remains critical.

To be fair, Soar, Adam, Soar isn’t just a story about a trans man. It’s also a story about epilepsy, the medical establishment, and coming of age as seen through a grieving father’s eyes. Adam, Prashaw’s trans son, died unexpectedly at age 22. Woven through the elder Prashaw’s narrative are excerpts from Adam’s social media posts, giving us glimpses into the young man’s interior life as he traverses his late teens and early 20s. […]

Book Geeks reviews Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love :

WRITING STYLE: 3.5/5

SUBJECT: 4/5

CANDIDNESS: 4.5/5

RELEVANCE: 3.5/5

ENTERTAINMENT QUOTIENT: 3.5/5

“Eat Pray Love” is so popular that it is almost impossible to not read it. Having felt ashamed many times on my not having read this book, I quietly ordered the book (before I saw the movie) from amazon.in and sat down to read it. I don’t remember what I expected it to be – maybe more like a chick lit thing but it turned out quite different. The book is a real story and is a short journal from the time when its writer went travelling to three different countries in pursuit of three different things – Italy (Pleasure), India (Spirituality), Bali (Balance) and this is what corresponds to the book’s name – EAT (in Italy), PRAY (in India) and LOVE (in Bali, Indonesia). These are also the three Is – ITALY, INDIA, INDONESIA.

Though she had everything a middle-aged American woman can aspire for – MONEY, CAREER, FRIENDS, HUSBAND; Elizabeth was not happy in her life, she wasn’t happy in her marriage. Having suffered a terrible divorce and terrible breakup soon after, Elizabeth was shattered. She didn’t know where to go and what to do – all she knew was that she wanted to run away. So she set out on a weird adventure – she will go to three countries in a year and see if she can find out what she was looking for in life. This book is about that life changing journey that she takes for one whole year. […]

Emily May reviews Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Goodreads:

Look, I'm not a happy crier. I might cry at songs about leaving and missing someone; I might cry at books where things don't work out; I might cry at movies where someone dies. I've just never really understood why people get all choked up over happy, inspirational things. But Michelle Obama's kindness and empathy changed that. This book had me in tears for all the right reasons.

This is not really a book about politics, though political experiences obviously do come into it. It's a shame that some will dismiss this book because of a difference in political opinion, when it is really about a woman's life. About growing up poor and black on the South Side of Chicago; about getting married and struggling to maintain that marriage; about motherhood; about being thrown into an amazing and terrifying position.

I hate words like "inspirational" because they've become so overdone and cheesy, but I just have to say it-- Michelle Obama is an inspiration. I had the privilege of seeing her speak at The Forum in Inglewood, and she is one of the warmest, funniest, smartest, down-to-earth people I have ever seen in this world.

And yes, I know we present what we want the world to see, but I truly do think it's genuine. I think she is someone who really cares about people - especially kids - and wants to give them better lives and opportunities.

She's obviously intelligent, but she also doesn't gussy up her words. She talks straight, with an openness and honesty rarely seen. She's been one of the most powerful women in the world, she's been a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she's had her own successful career, and yet she has remained throughout that same girl - Michelle Robinson - from a working class family in Chicago.

I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better idea of how to write a book review. You might be wondering how to put all of this knowledge into action now! Many book reviewers start out by setting up a book blog. If you don’t have time to research the intricacies of HTML, check out Reedsy Discovery — where you can read indie books for free and review them without going through the hassle of creating a blog. To register as a book reviewer , go here .

And if you’d like to see even more book review examples, simply go to this directory of book review blogs and click on any one of them to see a wealth of good book reviews. Beyond that, it's up to you to pick up a book and pen — and start reviewing!

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Book Reviews

Beautiful, icy 'history of wolves' transcends genre.

Michael Schaub

History of Wolves

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There's a reason that some readers view contemporary coming-of-age novels with suspicion. Too many play out the same way: An odd but winsome young person goes on some kind of journey of discovery, either literal or figurative, and learns something about himself or herself in the process. Often, there's an awkward romance. And the ending, whether happy or otherwise, can usually be described as bittersweet.

There are exceptions, of course, and Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel History of Wolves is one of them. The book doesn't follow the now-familiar narrative arc that other novels in the genre do. There's no moment of revelation at the end; if anything, the protagonist ends up more confused than she was at the beginning. Fridlund refuses to obey the conventions that her sometimes hidebound colleagues do, and her novel is so much the better for it.

History of Wolves follows a 14-year-old girl named Madeline, though nobody calls her that: "At school, I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak." The unkind nicknames are the result of her upbringing on a northern Minnesota commune, long since abandoned by all of its idealistic residents, with the exception of her parents. To them, Linda is something of an enigma, overly serious, lacking the heedless playfulness of other children. "[My mother] wanted very badly for me to cavort and pretend, to prove I was unharmed, happy," Linda muses, but she finds herself unable to participate in the ruse.

Linda's year is changed by the arrival of a new history teacher, Mr. Grierson, the kind of adult desperate to be seen as cool by his adolescent charges. Linda makes a passing attempt to seduce him; later, he's arrested and accused of possessing child pornography and having sex with one of his students.

When a new family moves across the lake from the mostly abandoned commune, Linda sees a chance to distract herself from her unhappy home and school life. She develops a quick affection for Patra, a young woman who works editing her astronomer husband's manuscripts, and their four-year-old boy, Paul. The couple hires Linda to babysit Paul during the summer days.

Linda doesn't know quite what to make of Paul, or of children in general. "By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks," she thinks. "They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that's what you wanted — pretenders who didn't know they were pretending at all."

Patra, Paul and Linda grow close, although Linda harbors misgivings about Leo, the quiet and mysterious father of the boy. It doesn't take long for Linda's doubts to be confirmed, when something terrible happens — it's out of the blue, and it leaves both Linda and the reader in shock.

History of Wolves isn't a typical thriller any more than it's a typical coming-of-age novel; Fridlund does a remarkable job transcending genres without sacrificing the suspense that builds steadily in the book. She's particularly effective using descriptions of nature to provide eerie foreshadowing: "You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. ... The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters."

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the novel is Fridlund's portrayal of Linda, who the reader encounters not just as a teenager, but, in brief flash-forward scenes, as an adult still psychically wounded from the events of the summer. Sometimes people overcome the traumas they were subjected to as children; sometimes they don't. For most people, and for Linda, it's somewhere in between.

"Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things," an adult Linda reflects. "But isn't that the crux of the problem? Wouldn't we all act differently if we were someone else?"

Looking in hindsight isn't any more accurate than trying to predict the future, of course; and neither really works out for Linda. But she's such an incredible character — both typical and special, sometimes capable of great love and sometimes spectacularly not — that it's hard to turn away from her sometimes horrifying story. History of Wolves is as beautiful and as icy as the Minnesota woods where it's set, and with her first book, Fridlund has already proven herself to be a singular talent.

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History of the Rain by Niall Williams review – pure eccentric entertainment

Niall Williams came to prominence in 1997 with the publication of his first book, Four Letters of Love . Intense and poetic, it was an international bestseller and set the tone for his subsequent novels – fatalistic, lyrical works firmly embedded in the landscape of rural Ireland. Williams's latest, the Man-Booker -longlisted History of the Rain , is no exception.

On the banks of the river Shannon, in Faha, County Clare, "where everyone is a long story", 19-year-old Ruth Swain is confined to bed with an unidentified, debilitating blood disorder. No longer able to participate in the activities of the community, Ruth becomes its omniscient recorder, although the bulk of the tale she recounts is that of her own convoluted family history. Sequestered Rapunzel-like in her tower room, she lies under a skylight in a boat-shaped bed carved lovingly if inexpertly by her late poet father, Virgil Swain. There is something of the languid 19th-century invalid about Ruth, not least because of her love of Victorian literature; her closest companions are the 3,958 books from Virgil's library surrounding her bed, taking the form of guardian angels, or barricades, depending on the interpretation. (It is easy to drift into whimsy when presented with some of the novel's more syrupy passages).

Ruth's voice, by contrast with her condition, is spiky, sardonic and precocious. As she proudly explains, she has a tendency to use capital letters, in common with her heroine Emily Dickinson : "I have had Something Amiss, Something Puzzling and We're Not Sure Yet". But if her declarative style quickly becomes cloying, the story is pure eccentric entertainment.

Williams hits his comic stride with the Swain family biography, aided by interjections and asides from Ruth. The un-Irish surname is explained by her grandfather Abraham Swain's settling in the west of Ireland via Wiltshire and the trenches of the first world war, rejecting the church career – "soul-polishing was the family business" – so assiduously taken up by his own father. Abraham "forsook the world for fishing", and the bigger the salmon the better: along the way, he absent-mindedly fathers four children and enters into a war of attrition with his formidable wife.

Virgil, their only son, is a dreamy reader who goes, literally, to sea when his parents die and the bank closes in on their grand house. Years later, Mary MacCarroll encounters a stranger standing stock-still for hours by the river: Abraham returned from overseas. Their courtship, marriage and the arrival of twins, Ruth and brother Aeney, are rapturously described. Virgil is a poet who never publishes, a farmer whose every crop fails. He reads William Blake to the cows and has episodes of transcendence.

The novel is suffused with this otherworldliness while being rooted in the everyday. It is also crammed with literature, from Ruth's beloved Charles Dickens – whose caricatures find contemporary equivalents in the inhabitants of Faha – to Robert Louis Stevenson , whose bedridden genius she closely identifies with, along with Dickinson's elliptical solitude. The river and the endless rain are so present they become characters in themselves: Ruth notes wryly that in Ireland it has rained for "800 years". Now it is a country between "Boom and Bust", with Ruth "in the margin, where the narrator should be, between this world and the next". The river offers both solace and treachery: its enigmatic invitation leading to a terrible loss.

Williams's rendering of the desolation of grief is affecting, as is the sympathy he evokes for the spirited Ruth's plight. Yet he can't seem to resist cliche and sentimentality, leaving the waterlogged reader longing for dry land.

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A sympathetic look at the rise — and stall — of gay conservatives

Neil j. young’s ‘coming out republican’ offers the history of a movement that may not have actually been that influential.

History may be written by the victors, but Neil J. Young’s excellent new book, “ Coming Out Republican ,” is a sympathetic look at one of the past century’s losers: the gay conservative. Young, a historian by training, has spent his career explaining the heterogeneity of the conservative movement. His first book, “ We Gather Together ,” was about the alliances and rivalries among Catholics, Mormons and evangelicals that birthed the Christian right, and Young has written about religion and politics for the New York Times and CNN.

“Coming Out Republican” moves from the 1950s to the present, telling the stories of the closeted operators and buttoned-up political clubs that often served as the Myrtle Wilson to the Christian right’s Daisy Buchanan, their sense of entitlement out of proportion to the way their supposed allies treated them. Sometimes these gay men acted gallantly to expand the individual freedoms of their queer countrymen. But there are also many instances in the book of them selling out the other civil rights movements in whose wake they traveled. “Coming Out Republican” is less about an interest group than a self-interest group, one that has long been unable to envision a liberation project more ambitious than expanding the sexual prerogatives of White men.

“Coming Out Republican” is at its best when using profiles of individual men to depict the eras in which they lived. Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War hero, came out in 1975 and sued the federal government to reenlist after he was kicked out of the military. Conservative and macho, Matlovich claimed that “everything I am and everything I hope to be I owe to the United States Air Force.” He relied on Frank Kameny, of the gay advocacy group the Mattachine Society, and a lawyer from the ACLU to sue on his behalf. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine, he had a dark mustache from central casting, but he was an imperfect poster boy, all-American but naive about gay life. He once bashfully asked a reporter from the Advocate — an eminent gay magazine — what the publication was.

In his study of Matlovich, Young deftly, if a little dryly, parses the cross currents of imperialism, respectability and internecine gay resentment. His prose is at times as vanilla as the men he writes about, relying on ventriloquism of vulgar gay patois for color. In other illuminating sketches, we meet figures such as Jon Hinson, the Bible-thumping congressman from Mississippi who resigned after getting caught performing oral sex on a Black Library of Congress technician in a bathroom in the Capitol, and Terry Dolan, Ronald Reagan’s whiz kid pollster who bragged about purging moderates from Congress, bulldozing a path for the Christian right’s ascension in the 1980s. They are but two of the legions of closeted Republicans who believed in privacy for a man’s sex life but not, among other things, a woman’s right to an abortion . Young takes so much care describing the different ways Matlovich, Hinson and Dolan conceived of themselves, and the roles they played in the politics of their era, that their deaths feel like a gut-punch. Each one died of AIDS.

Less successful are Young’s sections on gay Republican groups — the Log Cabin Republicans, the Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, the Lincoln Republican Club, Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, GOProud — whose sheer number of names reflects how often they split off from one another. Most of the book’s colorful characters were better at acting out and working covertly than they were at building large coalitions, so the stakes of their collective action — like persuading a few thousand San Francisco Republicans to oppose a California ballot initiative — feel low.

Young also has the credulous habit of, for example, describing a group whose membership “doubled that year to over 150” and citing the growth as evidence of its strength, when such crowds would barely match a modest gay bar’s Saturday night or a Baptist church’s Sunday services. In instances when gay Republican groups have wielded influence in a decisive way — say, by whipping up a handful of votes to pass civil rights protections in the California legislature and marriage equality in the New York legislature — it is not because they had power that could not be ignored. It is because in the eyes of Republican lawmakers in very liberal states, gay Republicans could, like a mistress that doesn’t ask or expect too much, be indulged from time to time.

But that’s state politics. At the national level, gay Republicans have been betrayed and insulted by every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan. In 1980, they had reasons for optimism. Despite Reagan’s conservative bona fides, two years earlier he helped defeat a California referendum that would have barred gay people from teaching in public schools. But as president, his embrace of the religious right was so close, and his administration’s antipathy for people with AIDS so pronounced, that it further stained the Republican Party’s reputation with gay people. George H.W. Bush ran as a moderate and even signed gay-friendly legislation like the Ryan White Care Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act before abandoning tolerance to court the religious right. Less than a decade after he left office, his son campaigned as a compassionate conservative, and then ran for reelection supporting a constitutional amendment to forbid same-sex marriage. Donald Trump also seemed to embrace LGBTQ people as he campaigned for the 2016 election, but as president he nominated judges hostile to LGBTQ rights and supported policies that made it easier for people claiming religious exemptions to discriminate against sexual minorities.

Young makes a persuasive case that gay Republicans contributed to the civil rights progress of the last few decades. Intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan and operators like Ken Mehlman, who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign from the closet, contributed to the push for marriage equality and military participation. But neither man — or really any conservative advocate — did nearly as much as Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal lawyer, who articulated the intellectual foundations of same-sex marriage and executed the political strategy to make it a reality. The simple fact is that liberal gays have been more clear-eyed about power than their conservative counterparts, better at building coalitions and more wary of placating the Christian conservatives who do not believe there is a place for sexual minorities in public life.

Young could have more forcefully thought through the reluctance of gay Republicans to find common cause with members of other minority groups. The obvious answer is the most uncomfortable one: Gay Republicans see themselves as having more in common with other White people, rich people and men. Unfortunately, the only way that the numerically few can wield power is through solidarity with other minorities, but that requires insight that does not always come easily to White gay men, especially conservative White gay men: None of us is that special, and trying to be “not that kind of gay” comes at a cost. One of the most heartbreaking themes of “Coming Out Republican” is how unfamiliar many conservative gays are with the varying joys of gay life — writing it off as too “PC” or too promiscuous. Being gay can be quite fun, not despite but because of our endless squabbles and struggles over how to keep this life distinct and ours, and open to as many people as want to partake.

Anyone could benefit from reading this book. Straight people will learn how the puritanical impulse to control other people’s ’ sex lives has defined politics for nearly a century, an impulse as old as it is futile. Queer people — who often must teach ourselves our own history — will learn how respectability remains an empty promise. But it is gay Republicans themselves who most need to read Young’s book. If they are not too vain, the Peter Thiels and George Santoses of the world might find in these pages a warning that having power is not the same thing as being tolerated until you are no longer useful.

Nathan Kohrman is a writer covering medicine, politics and culture. Based in New York, he is an incoming general surgery resident at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Coming Out Republican

A History of the Gay Right

By Neil J. Young

University of Chicago Press. 441 pp. $29.99

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Book review: A lively history of otters, crocodiles and other Singaporean Creatures

Singaporean Creatures: Histories Of Humans And Other Animals In The Garden City

Edited by Timothy P. Barnard Non-fiction/NUS Press/Paperback/277 pages/Amazon SG ( amzn.to/3w7i9VD ) 4 stars

What claims do animals – say, the Zouk otters of social media fame, the feared and dengue-carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti or Singapore’s most iconic orang utan Ah Meng – have to being Singaporean?

Surely not by dint of legal citizenship or self-identification, but perhaps by the status Singapore’s human denizens and policymakers have bestowed on these creatures.

One might recall Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s words in 2018 upon the death of Inuka, the first polar bear born in the tropics at the Singapore Zoo: “He was as Singaporean as any of us.”

A new volume of essays on environmental history furnishes a lively and persuasive account of Singapore’s relationship with animals from the mid-20th century onwards. It follows the fate and agency of creatures like the crocodile from the final years of British colonial rule to Singapore’s nascent independence up to the present.

Edited by Timothy P. Barnard, associate professor in the department of history at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Singaporean Creatures does not explicitly argue for the peculiar – even provocative – moniker it uses as its title.

In his introduction, Barnard settles for the Singaporean Creature’s “complex role and position in Singaporean society and history”, but is cautious not to venture a restrictive definition tied solely to ideas of governance and control.

Readers, therefore, are free to draw conclusions from the collection’s eight wide-ranging essays – written mostly by historians – which implicitly argue for a term that at once implies citizenship, ownership, belonging and affinity.

For a “preliminary investigation”, the scholarly book certainly throws up several interesting conjectures and its fascinating narration of ideas will keep even the layman reader riveted.

One idea of the Singaporean Creature that runs throughout the book is how early national development policy regulated and structured Singapore’s relationship with animals. Unsurprisingly, the history of relocating citizens from kampungs to high-rise public housing from the 1960s onwards crops up frequently.

Mr Esmond Chuah Meng Soh, a graduate student at the Nanyang Technological University, shows how many Singaporeans who historically cohabitated with crocodiles had an attitude of “informed nonchalance” towards the reptiles.

This gave way to the transformation of crocodiles into symbols of “untamed nature” from the 1960s, as crocodile sightings became the subject of media sensationalism and even a form of cryptozoology with the fascination around white crocodiles.

His point resonates with an essay by Barnard, who argues how rhetoric around the belligerent presence of Aedes mosquitoes in post-war Singapore coincided with a rhetoric for the push for societal transformation through HDB flats.

It was also in 1968 when the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act was drafted, which provided more teeth to control persons who propagated a range of pests.

Assistant professor at NUS Faizah Zakaria contributes a substantial chapter on songbirds and how they line up with the emergence of a more manicured Garden City concept. The first formal bird-singing contest in Singapore, for example, was staged in 1964 – a much more pleasant alternative to bird fights such as cockfighting, which the Government was trying to outlaw then.

The binary of native and invasive species – or domestic and migrant species, to use terms associated with the human – also frequently emerges in the discussion. Both groups have claim to “Singaporean” status in a highly globalised, multi-species city – although this is not without controversy.

Assistant professor Anthony Medrano at Yale-NUS College makes the case for the common tilapia as a “diasporic fish”. It was a non-native species which came to Singapore through imperial Japan’s colonial network in Indonesia, which eventually became a forgotten chapter of Singapore’s role in the expansion of global aquaculture.

But the fate of the Singaporean Creature is not just the result of imperial ambition or social and economic imperatives. It is as much shaped by public fascination and fantasy: Facebook groups tracking the movement of otters, breakfast with Ah Meng and controversies around Inuka the polar bear are all part of that story.

One wonders, then, if the muted public reaction to the death of four gorillas within a year at the Singapore Zoological Gardens in 1983 – as cited by graduate fellow at the University of Hawai’i Choo Ruizhi – despite an international outcry meant that the gorilla had not qualified, at least in the public eye, as a Singaporean Creature.

Thoroughly intriguing and readable, Singaporean Creatures is also a worthy “sequel” to Barnard’s earlier book Imperial Creatures, which explored Singapore’s relationship with other animals within an earlier time frame of 1819 to 1942.

For readers who have been enthralled by a rare sambar deer sighting or horrified by the large crocodiles which still appear amid urban life, Singaporean Creatures reveals the historical sources of one’s fear and fascination.

If you like this, read: Eating Chilli Crab In The Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives On Life In Singapore (Ethos Books, 2020, $11.90, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3vLyEa0 ), a series of essays on the environment through a more popular culture and often personal lens. There are discussions on Tiger Beer, orang minyak (“oily man” in Malay) films and the Singaporean pastime of eating crabs.

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‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ Review: Henry Cavill Leads a Pack of Inglorious Rogues in Guy Ritchie’s Spirited WWII Coup

The 'Sherlock Holmes' director takes a page from history, bringing his trademark attitude to a bombastic black ops mission that turned the tide against the Nazis.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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In “ The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes an illicit mission to undermine Hitler’s fleet of German U-boats during World War II. The plan calls for renegades with little respect for the rules, led by a cocky ex-criminal named Gus March-Phillipps ( Henry Cavill ), who’s released from prison and called into a top-secret briefing. Oblivious to etiquette, Gus helps himself to a tall glass of Scotch whisky, steals an entire box of cigars and struts over to the desk where a priggish-looking officer sits. Gus swipes his lighter, making a fool of the uptight chap, who identifies himself as “Fleming, Ian Fleming .”

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All the way back to “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Ritchie has been jazzing up genre movies (gangster stories, mostly) with crackling dialogue and trick camera moves. While hardly shy on attitude, “Ministry” finds the stylistically aggressive director in a tamer, slightly more traditional mode, featuring relatively conservative repartee (including loads of clunky exposition) and fairly straightforward set-pieces. As a whole, the movie hews to the standard men-on-a-mission formula, joining classics such as “The Guns of Navarone” and “The Dirty Dozen” in assembling a pack of highly skilled — if slightly disreputable — pros to attempt the impossible.

M makes no false claims for what looks like a sacrifice operation. If the men are killed, the British government will deny it. And if they succeed, these heroes shouldn’t expect to be recognized as such. In Ritchie’s telling, the carnage is reward enough. (The details were not declassified until 2016, but now that the facts are known, the script — credited to Ritchie and three others — freely embellishes them.) On the Goodreads site, a four-year-old review correctly predicted, “I think it would make a better movie than a book. Especially the center piece chapters, where the squad manages to steal German ships in a harbor off the coast of Africa.”

That’s a bingo, as this daring scheme drives most of the plot, which involves the five guys sailing down to Fernando Po, a neutral island off the coast of Cameroon, where an Italian cargo ship called the Duchessa d’Aosta is being loaded with Nazi supplies. While Gus’ team travels by sea, two undercover allies — Jewish Mata Hari type Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and well-connected black marketeer Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) — take the train. The plan is to meet up on the island, blow up the Duchessa and screw up the Nazis’ ability to reload their U-boats, which controlled the Atlantic and prevented Americans from joining the war.

Ritchie’s approach owes more than a little to Quentin Tarantino, whose “Inglourious Basterds” sets the tone for much of the operation. There are smooth-talking Nazi officers whose charm masks their menace and a bombshell vixen expected to outsmart — and potentially seduce — the worst of them, the sadistic yet cunning Heinrich Luhr (Teuton action star Til Schweiger). The movie relies on a terrific ensemble in nearly all its lead roles, apart from Churchill. Sporting a swollen chest and tightly curled handlebar mustache, Cavill brings a charm all but absent from the stiff secret agent he played in “Argylle,” while Ritchson — between his homoerotic flirting and homicidal flair — seems destined to be the fan favorite.

If anything, this dimension of the plot seems the least developed, seeing as how audiences have grown desensitized to rogue agents disregarding the formalities (and laws) of war. It doesn’t entirely track that such a mission would be frowned upon back home, though it does make things slightly more exciting for Gus and his cohorts, since the British Navy can’t come to their aid — and in fact, is standing by to arrest and court-martial them, should the plan go pear-shaped. While cartoonish at times, the behavior on offer here is a long way from the PG-13 exploits of Ian Fleming’s gentleman spy, with his fitted tuxedo and fussy cocktail preferences. Leave it to Ritchie to stir things up.

Reviewed at Regal Sherman Oaks Galleria, Los Angeles, April 13, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 120 MIN.

• Production: A Lionsgate release of a Black Bear, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Toff Guy production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Guy Ritchie, Chad Oman, Ivan Atkinson, John Friedberg. Executive producers: Mohammed Al Turki, Dave Caplan, Jason Cloth, Olga Filipuk, Michael Heimler, Eric Johnson, K. Blaine Johnston, Scott LaStaiti, Damien Lewis, Llewellyn Radley, Anders Sandberg, Teddy Schwarzman, Jill Silfen, Paul Tamasy, Christopher Woodrow. Co-producers: Max Keene, Niall Perrett, Alex Sutherland.
• Crew: Director: Guy Ritchie. Screenplay: Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, Arash Amel & Guy Ritchie, based on the book “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops” by Damien Lewis. Camera: Ed Wild. Editor: James Herbert. Music: Christopher Benstead.
• With: Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, BabsOlusamokun, Henrique Zaga, Til Schweiger, with Henry Golding, Cary Elwes. (English, German dialogue)

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