501 Fall 2008
Introduction to Graduate Studies in Spanish

The Book Review

The Book review forms one of the essential building blocks of the academy. For the reviewers it can be the beginning of a strategy for publishing. Many graduate students and younger scholars begin their publishing careers writing book reviews for academic journals. The book review forms an important part of a search plan since it allows the scholar access to what could be an important work os scholarship and forces the scholar to conceptualize a point of view on the work.

Reviews offer authors and publishers with valuable feedback. Authors provide this information to bodies that review them to show how their scholarly work is received. Publishers use reviews to make important marketing decisions. A positive review in a major international publication like the New York Times Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, of the the New York Review of Books can be a career maker. The same holds true for a review in the literary section of a major Spanish publication. A review in the professional journal Choice, read by acquisitions librarians can assure that a book is acquired by most major public libraries and university libraries around the country. Reviews and reviewers, therefore, are important. A number of academic journals publish reviews.

Commercial and academic presses send review copies of books to journals and magazines. Book Review Editors or other staff members at the journal then contact somebody in the field and request that the review the book. The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, for example, receives somewhere between 50 and 200 books per year to review and publishes between 30 and 50 reviews in each issue.

As a general rule of thumb, the tone of a review varies according to the audience of the publication. A review in a major newspaper like the Washington Post, will be different than a review in a scholarly journal. The guidelines for a review in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies for which you will be writing are straight forward and pretty standard. Follow them when preparing your review.

1. Your review should be 500-750 words which is the equivalent of two to three double spaced pages. It is important to stay within these guidelines so as to assure a level of consistency throughout the reviews published in the journal.
2. A review should balance an explanation of the content of the work with an evaluation of it.
3. You should review the book not the author or the theory being used in the book. While objectivity is impossible, some a sense of evenhandedness is important.

To prepare for the review exercise the best thing to do is to read reviews published in the journal for which you have been asked to review and others like Hispania, the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, which publishes many reviews each year.