book review of a non fiction book

Lesley Ann McDaniel

Real Life~Pure Fiction

How to Write a Nonfiction Book Review

May 13, 2013

Do you love reading nonfiction books? Why not try your hand at reviewing them.

What is a nonfiction book review?

A book review is a critical evaluation of a book. It isn’t just a summary, but gives commentary that will be uniquely yours as the writer of the review. The difference between a review of fiction versus nonfiction is that with the latter, the reviewer will evaluate the piece not so much on its entertainment value as on whether it fulfills its promise to solve a particular problem or deliver certain information.

Why write book reviews?

Reviews help books get noticed and gain credibility. Writers want to receive reviews to show readers that their book is widely-read and well-received.

Where are reviews posted?

These days, the answer is ‘lots of places.’ Many reviewers post book reviews on their own blogs. You can also post reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, library websites, or submit them to other people’s review blogs. If you really want to get serious, there are a lot of literary journals that accept freelance reviews.

How long should a review be?

That will depend largely on where you are planning to submit your review. Check for guidelines, and assume that you will write anywhere from 100 to 1500 words. Be succinct, but give enough to serve the purpose of the review.

Points to Consider:

●What if you really don’t like the book? Always write your reviews with integrity. If you honestly don’t like a book, write your review as if you are in a critique session with the author. Use positive words and avoid sarcasm.

●Take time to read reviews written by other readers, but keep in mind that many of them are not trained reviewers.

●Review the book that has been written, not the book you think the author should have written. It isn’t fair to criticize an author for failing to achieve something he or she never intended to achieve.

Nonfiction Book Review Template:

Opening statement: Include title and author.

What does the book promise to deliver to the reader? Another way to look at it is, what problem does this book promise to solve?

Does it accomplish what it sets out to accomplish?

If so, how?

If not, what could the author have done differently?

What makes this author uniquely qualified to write on this topic?

What is the tone of the book? Is it humorous and easy to relate to, or is it more dry and academic?

Overall impression: This is where you give your personal take on the book.

Suggested points to include:

Was the book written in a way that you as a reader could easily relate to?

What was your favorite part of the book?

Do you have a least favorite part of the book?

If you could change something, what would it be?

Are there photos or illustrations? If so, are they effective in enhancing the book’s message?

Would you recommend this book?

What type of reader would enjoy this book?

There are so many wonderful nonfiction books out there. Have a great time reading and reviewing!

Have you written any nonfiction book reviews?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy How to Write a Fiction Book Review .

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Best Non Fiction Book Review Blogs in 2024

Showing 81 blogs that match your search.

https://www.chapter92.com/

Writer, book blogger, tea drinker, late night snacker. Professional cryer who spends way too much time online, eating books for breakfast. Basically, your bookish best bud.

Blogger : Marilù Iacona

Genres : Non-Fiction

🌐 Domain authority: 7

👀 Average monthly visits: 1,500 p/mo

💌 Preferred contact method: Website contact form

⭐️ Accepts indie books? Yes

Bookish Santa

https://www.bookishsanta.com/blogs/booklings-world

Bookish Santa's blog will help you find your next read! Read book reviews, find best book recommendations, learn more about your favorite authors, their lifestyle, and so much more.

Blogger : Bookish Santa

🌐 Domain authority: 29

👀 Average monthly visits: 23,501 p/mo

💌 Preferred contact method: Email

⭐️ Accepts indie books? No

I'm All Booked Up

https://imallbookedup.com/

We write book reviews, list posts and author interviews. We're open to guest posts.

Blogger : Christy and Claire

🌐 Domain authority: 21

👀 Average monthly visits: 3,000 p/mo

Literary Titan

https://literarytitan.com/

We review books, conduct author interviews, and have monthly book awards.

Blogger : Thomas Anderson

🌐 Domain authority: 30

👀 Average monthly visits: 12,000 p/mo

Sarah's Bookshelves

https://www.sarahsbookshelves.com

Please send all review requests to [email protected]. Unfortunately, I cannot accept every review request that I receive, but I am happy to review books that sound interesting to me and for which my schedule allows.

Blogger : Sarah

🌐 Domain authority: 33

👀 Average monthly visits: 5,000 p/mo

💌 Preferred contact method: Mail

Sunflower Publishing Book Reviews

https://www.sunflowerpublishing.com/book-reviews

On this blog you can find reviews about any books set in Italy.

Blogger : Italy Writers

🌐 Domain authority: 12

👀 Average monthly visits: 100 p/mo

Social Book Shelves

http://www.socialbookshelves.com

My name's Dane Cobain, and I'm the guy behind SocialBookshelves.com. SocialBookshelves.com was founded in April 2013 and officially launched on May 1st of the same year as a book blog with a difference - each review is constrained by the number of pages contained in the book.

Blogger : Dane Cobain

🌐 Domain authority: 40

👀 Average monthly visits: 7,100 p/mo

Read. Eat. Repeat.

https://readeatrepeat.net/

Hi! I’m Jordan, wife to one husband and mom to two little girls. Blogging and writing are my side gig, and I love creating delicious recipes and reading lots of books to share with you guys! My favorite genre to review is historical fiction but I do read a bit of everything.

Blogger : Jordan

🌐 Domain authority: 26

👀 Average monthly visits: 2,500 p/mo

From First Page to Last

https://fromfirstpagetolast.wordpress.com/

I like to read different genres of books, both fiction and non fiction. If the blurb grabs me then I’ll want to read it. I cannot promise a review deadline but will honour all review requests I accept. Please let me know if you have a preferred timeframe for reviews to be published and I will aim to review within that time.

Blogger : Janet Emson

🌐 Domain authority: 15

https://bookvue.wordpress.com/

Book Vue was born out of the editor's restless desire to share with the world thoughts and opinions on some of the greatest books out there. The honesty behind each review is the essence of the blog.

Blogger : Chitra Iyer

🌐 Domain authority: 5

Writing Follies

https://writingfollies.wordpress.com

Hi! This is Nicole and Isis, and we will be running this awesome book blog. We're both aspiring authors, which means that we do a lot of reading and writing, so we hope you enjoy our posts! Here we will discuss some of our favorite books.

Blogger : Nicole & Isis

🌐 Domain authority: 10

Likely Story

https://likelystory.blog/

I started Likely Story to share my love of books with the world. I have been known to stay up until 3am, lost in a book and I decided I wanted to spread the word and share as many of them as I could with other readers. Happy reading!

Blogger : Alex

🌐 Domain authority: 8

The Literary Edit

https://thelitedit.com/start-here/

Welcome to The Literary Edit! I’m Lucy, founder and editor of The Literary Edit, and a long standing bookworm with a passion for brilliant books, independent bookstores and literary festivals. Based between London and Sydney, The Literary Edit will bring you the best in all things bookish – from weekly book reviews, to beautiful bookstore features, to literary city guides and beyond.

Blogger : Lucy

🌐 Domain authority: 31

👀 Average monthly visits: 10,000 p/mo

Indie Reader

http://indiereader.com/

There were over 391,000 books self-published in 2012. That's a lot of company (and competition!) for any author.åÊIndieReader offers the best value for reviews, bar none. IR's reviewers & some of the best in the field & will let you know if you've achieved what you set out to do. Charges may apply. IR also recommends titles to the HUFFINGTON POST and USA TODAY.

Blogger : The IndieReader Team

🌐 Domain authority: 49

👀 Average monthly visits: 15,000 p/mo

Literary Quicksand

https://literaryquicksand.com/

We’re a book blog based out of Minneapolis, MN. We feature a group of women writers from multiple countries who all come together over one thing: our love of books!

Blogger : Jolissa Skow

👀 Average monthly visits: 4,000 p/mo

So you want to find a book blog?

If you’re a voracious reader, you might think of a book blog as an oasis in the middle of the desert: a place on the Internet that brims with talk about books, books, and more books.

Well, good news — we built this directory of the 200 of the best book blogs to satiate your thirst. Take a walk around, use the filters to narrow down your search to blogs in your preferred genre, and feel free to bookmark this page and come back, as we do update it regularly with more of the best book blogs out there.

If you’re an aspiring author, you might see a book blog more as a book review blog: a place where you can get your yet-to-be published book reviewed. In that case, you’ll be glad to know that most of the book blogs in our directory are open to review requests and accept indie books! We expressly designed this page (and our book marketing platform, Reedsy Discovery ) to be useful to indie book authors who need book reviews. If you’re wondering how to approach a book blog for a review request, please read on.

You’ve found a book blog. Now what?

Let’s say that you’re an author, and you’ve found a couple of book blogs that would be perfect fits to review your book. What now? Here are some tips as you go about getting your book reviews:

Be sure to read the review policy. First, check that the book blog you’re querying is open to review requests. If that’s the fortunate case, carefully read the blog’s review policy and make sure that you follow the directions to a T.
Individualize your pitches. Book bloggers will be able to immediately tell apart the bulk pitches, which simply come across as thoughtless and indifferent. If you didn’t take the time to craft a good pitch, why should the blogger take the time to read your book? Personalize each pitch to up your chances of getting a response.
Format your book in a professional manner before sending it out. Ensure that your manuscript isn’t presented sloppily. If the book blogger asks for a digital ARC, you might want to check out apps such as Instafreebie or Bookfunnel.
Create a spreadsheet to track your progress. Wading through so many book blogs can be troublesome — not to mention trying to remember which ones you’ve already contacted. To save yourself the time and trouble, use a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your progress (and results).

Looking to learn even more about the process? Awesome 👍 For a detailed guide, check out this post that’s all about getting book reviews .

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She Seeks Nonfiction

A skeptic's quest for books, science, & humanism

How to Write a Nonfiction Book Review

Next week, I will be writing my 50th nonfiction book review on this blog. Learning brings me great joy, and when I learn fascinating things in my books, I can’t help but share them with you!

With Nonfiction November coming up, I know that many fiction book bloggers will try their hand at reading and reviewing nonfiction, and that many people aren’t used to it. There is often no character development, plot, setting, or allegory to critique, so what is left? Well, there is actually a lot to talk about, and I think reviewing nonfiction books is a lot of fun! I hope that through this post, my passion for writing nonfiction book reviews can inspire the unsure to give it a try.

There is not one correct way to write a book review. I write mine for fun, as a way to make blog posts that entertain me and hopefully my audience. Reviews make reading more fun and they help me to better engage as I read. They can even make it more bearable to finish a book I hate, because I know that my review will be interesting ! Regardless, here are some tips that help me write book reviews that I am proud of.

Mark up your book

I’ll start off with the obvious: I think that underlining and taking notes in nonfiction books is a great way to remember what you read and get ideas for your review as you go. My husband is adamant that my constant marking up of brand new books makes me a crazy person, and I can’t blame him for that. Some people can’t stand it.

If this is you— or if you read library books —then don’t worry! You can still use sticky notes or keep a separate notebook handy. I actually do this when I read books that are so old I would not dare deface them. Of course, e-readers make this easy; you can highlight and add notes without vandalizing anything. Finally, I know that a lot of people like to listen to nonfiction audiobooks, but I can’t imagine that you would absorb the information enough to make a review that way. But hey, if you can, more power to you!

Answer these three questions

I believe that each review will be as different as each book is, but there are a few questions that I attempt to answer no matter what.

Does it accomplish its goal?

First, I critique it according to its own criteria. Does the title promise that the book will deliver something specific? Is it meant to persuade you or inform you, and if so, how does it do? If a book’s title starts with “How to,” then you know exactly what the goal is. For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi did exactly that; Kendi repeatedly began sentences with, “To be an antiracist is to…” which is about as straightforward as it gets. On the other hand, How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford might sound like it gives responses to specific points you’d hear in an argument, but it doesn’t. (It was still a great book though!)

(Now that I’m on the topic, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College by Jesse Wegman does give line-by-line responses for arguments, which I thought was a great approach.)

There are more ways that a book can express its goal. Maybe the introduction lays out why the book exists at all. This is one thing I really appreciate about Richard Dawkins’ books. My feelings about the book as a whole are mixed (and my feelings about Dawkins as a person are lacking), but in the preface of The God Delusion , Dawkins lists out exactly how he is going to make his case for atheism. He promises to meet different readers where they are. “Do you believe X? Well, I explain this exact thing in Chapter X.” The man knows how to make a promise. Obviously, a preface does not need to be this explicit to make a book good, but it definitely made my review easier. This was especially great for me, as The God Delusion was only the second book I ever reviewed.

Do I like it?

Even though Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue With a Racist did not teach me how to argue with a racist, I still gave it a rave review. That’s because the second question I set out to answer is a simple one: Did I like the book? I’m the one writing the review, so I decide whether it’s a positive or negative one. This is when book reviews get really subjective, and why I love when there are many of the same book. No two people will have the same exact opinions about it. Many times, I have admitted that a book was probably good , but that I don’t think I was the right audience for it.

Does it speak to a target audience?

This brings me to the third question: do you know the book’s target audience? If there is no clear audience, then there’s a good chance the whole book is moot. Take this post, for instance. My intended audience is primarily fiction book bloggers who are trying out nonfiction book reviews for November. Hopefully other people will find something useful or entertaining out of it, but if you don’t care about books or reviews or blogging at all, then this post probably isn’t for you.

Decide whether you want to stick to a formula

If you have never written a nonfiction book review before, it can be easier to follow a formula and always know what you want to include in your review. A great example of this is fellow nonfiction book blogger Paula Ghete ‘s book reviews such as this one of Cosmos by Carl Sagan ( which you can compare to mine to see how greatly our styles vary). Her book reviews are structured this way:

Title: Cosmos Author: Carl Sagan Category: Non-fiction, Science Rating: 5/5 10-Word Summary: We can understand the Universe only if we study it. About Cosmos [short summary] What I like about Cosmos [list with bullet points and descriptions] What I don’t like about Cosmos [list with bullet points and descriptions]

In other book reviews, such as this one , Paula also included the following sections:

Quotes from The Idiot Brain [lists eight relatively short quotes] Should You Read The Idiot Brain? [succinct, defined answer]

Admittedly, her reviews are clearly written with SEO and readability in mind. Search engines love to say, “The more headlines and the shorter the sections, the merrier,” so that they know what the post is about. This also helps the reader to get Paula’s big ideas even if they don’t wade through the – gasp – paragraphs !

On the other hand, my review of Cosmos described how it left me speechless, why it was virtually unreviewable, why it made me almost cry watching the launch of NASA’s Perseverance, and why Sagan is so beloved in the atheist community .

Something fun about me is that I pretty much write whatever I feel like writing, which might make you think that I would not be the most qualified to tell you how you should write your own book reviews, but there I go again, writing whatever I feel like which includes this review-tutorial. Look, I’m just here for a good time.

How my own book reviews take shape

As I said earlier, each review can be as different as each book. This is more true for someone like me than for someone who is a little more organized like Paula Ghete, because I don’t really abide by any restraints. I don’t write only book reviews, so if a review takes me to another topic that I care about anyways, I’ll just talk about that. I love when a book simply inspires me to share what I’ve learned from it, or gives me the opportunity to ponder something I wouldn’t have thought of if I hadn’t read it.

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels was a pretty informative book about—you guessed it—the Gnostic Gospels and Gnostic Christianity. I honestly didn’t have much to say about the book itself, but it caused me to compare early Gnostic Christianity to modern-day Progressive Christianity, list the similarities and differences, and pose the question to my Progressive Christian audience what they think of it.

My review of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart had a similar fate. An actual review of the book was definitely present throughout my post on it, but it was a great chance for me to delve into my own experiences learning about Christian Nationalism , inside and outside of Stewart’s book. I also found myself comparing The Power Worshippers to Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American and explaining why the two books complement each other.

When I’ve read two or more books by the same author or on the same subject, I love to compare and contrast them or explain how they go together. I’ve done that with these, as well as books by Ibram X. Kendi , Ian Tattersall , Carl Sagan , and the two most famous works in the atheist community .

Final thoughts

As is the case with many of my book reviews, there is a lot more I could say. And like those, I often have to stop myself from rambling on ad nauseum . When this happens with a review , I have to just give the big idea, some fun facts, and then tell my audience that you really ought to read it for yourself. So I’ll do that here. I hope that my advice has helped you to see nonfiction reviews as a little less scary, and I encourage you to try writing them yourself! I’m so excited to read them!

What do you think? Cancel reply

MSL Book Review

Sample nonfiction book reviews.

Nonfiction Reviews

Bomb The Race to Build – and Steal – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon is an engaging non-fiction book which had me from the first page. The book begins with a Prologue: May 22, 1950 the FBI arrives at Harry Gold’s door; Harry, still in pajamas, stares at two agents with a search warrant for his home as they are investigating his spying activities from the 30s and 40s. The jig was up and Harry declares “There is a great deal more to this story. It goes way back, and I would like to tell it all.” Thus begins the tale of the Manhattan Project from its inception. Even though we know the outcome of the race and understand the destruction, the excitement of the academics working on the bomb is felt.

This is an intriguing story of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the historical figures who played major roles in the development of atomic power. Many pictures and excellent source notes, quotes notes, and index make this a well documented book. Included in the Epilogue is the original letter from Albert Einstein written to F.D. Roosevelt, advising that a new energy form had been discovered by splitting the atom and that it needed to be monitored. This book is an excellent companion book to the fictional Green Glass Sea, which is set in Los Alamos and is the story of children and wives of the men working on the Manhattan Project.

Author Steve Sheinkin crafts a compelling thriller about the development of the atomic bomb in his book, Bomb: the Race to Build – and Steal- the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon. Sheinkin, using effective narrative techniques, introduces readers to the major personalities involved in the Manhattan Project as the Americans raced to construct an atomic bomb while keeping the knowledge from the Germans during World War II. The book takes us from the US to Great Britain, Norway, Germany, Russia, and Japan where scientists, politicians, and spies are all engaged in winning the war (and becoming a world power) through the creation of the “ultimate weapon.”

This volume will be especially useful for middle and high school students conducting research on World War II weapons and war strategy, as well as those looking for biographical information on the Manhattan Project scientists. Along with a detailed index, the author provides copious source and quotation notes. Black and white photographs of the important personalities and bomb testing site are sprinkled throughout. An essential purchase for American history and science collections.

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The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2021

Featuring george saunders, joan didion, michelle zauner, tom stoppard, tove ditlevsen, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections ; Poetry ; Mystery and Crime ; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction ; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Nonfiction .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

24 Rave • 6 Positive

“… powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short … Zauner’s food descriptions transport us to the table alongside her … a rare acknowledgement of the ravages of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be battled with hope and strength …Zauner carries the same clear-eyed frankness to writing about her mother’s death five months after her diagnosis … It is rare to read about a slow death in such detail, an odd gift in that it forces us to sit with mortality rather than turn away from it.”

–Kristen Martin ( NPR )

2. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nullally and Michael Favala Goldman (FSG)

23 Rave • 4 Positive Read an excerpt from The Copenhagen Trilogy here

“… beautiful and fearless … Ditlevsen’s memoirs…form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality—the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman—but that it exists at all. It’s a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real … A half-century later, all of it—her extraordinary clarity and imperfect femininity, her unstinting account of the struggle to reconcile art and life—still lands. The construct of memoir (and its stylish young cousin, autofiction) involves the organizing filter of retrospection, lending the impression that life is a continuous narrative reel of action and consequence, of meanings to be universalized … Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.”

–Megan O’Grady ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (Knopf)

13 Rave • 19 Positive • 3 Mixed Read an excerpt from Tom Stoppard: A Life here

“Lee…builds an ever richer, circular understanding of his abiding themes and concerns, of his personal and artistic life, and of his many other passionate engagements … Lee’s biography is unusual in that it was commissioned, and published while its subject is still alive. Lee is a highly acclaimed biographer whose rigor and integrity make her decision to write under such conditions surprising … Lee is frank and thoughtful about the challenges of writing about a living subject. She is aware, as the reader will be, that her interview subjects do not want to speak ill of a friend and colleague who is still among them. In addition to the almost unrelievedly positive portrayal of Stoppard, the seven-hundred-fifty-plus pages of this volume might have been somewhat condensed, were its subject no longer living, thereby rendering the biography easier to wield and to read. In spite of these quibbles, this is an extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain George Saunders

4. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (Random House)

20 Rave • 9 Positive • 3 Mixed • 2 Pan Listen to an interview with George Saunders here

“This book is a delight, and it’s about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment … I love the warmth with which he writes about this teaching … This kind of reading (one of the best kinds, I’m convinced) tracks the author’s intentions—and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious—so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence … All this makes Saunders’s book very different from just another ‘how to’ creative writing manual, or just another critical essay. In enjoyably throwaway fashion, he assembles along his way a few rules for writing … reading…with this rich, close attention will mulch down into any would-be writer’s experience, and repay them by fertilising their own work eventually … One of the pleasures of this book is feeling his own thinking move backwards and forwards, between the writer dissecting practice and the reader entering in through the spell of the words, to dwell inside the story.”

–Tessa Hadley ( The Guardian )

5. Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury)

18 Rave • 9 Positive Read an excerpt from Real Estate here

“[A] wonderful new book … Levy, whose prose is at once declarative and concrete and touched with an almost oracular pithiness, has a gift for imbuing ordinary observations with the magic of metaphor … The new volume, which follows the death of one version of the self, describes the uncertain birth of another … She herself is not always a purely likable, or reliable, narrator of her own experience, and her book is the richer for it.”

–Alexandra Schwartz ( The New Yorker )

6. Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (Penguin)

18 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Mark Harris’s portrait of director Mike Nichols is a pleasure to read and a model biography: appreciative yet critical, unfailingly intelligent and elegantly written. Granted, Harris has a hyper-articulate, self-analytical subject who left a trail of press coverage behind him, but Nichols used his dazzling conversational gifts to obfuscate and beguile as much as to confide … Harris, a savvy journalist and the author of two excellent cultural histories, makes judicious use of abundant sources in Mike Nichols: A Life to craft a shrewd, in-depth reckoning of the elusive man behind the polished facade … Harris gently covers those declining years with respect for the achievements that preceded them. His marvelous book makes palpable in artful detail the extraordinary scope and brilliance of those achievements.”

–Wendy Smith ( The Washington Post )

7. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

8. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

10. A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Biblioasis)

17 Rave • 4 Positive Read an excerpt from A Ghost in the Throat here

“… ardent, shape-shifting … The book is all undergrowth, exuberant, tangled passage. It recalls Nathalie Léger’s brilliant and original Suite for Barbara Loden : a biography of the actress and director that becomes a tally of the obstacles in writing such a book, and an admission of the near-impossibility of biography itself … The story that uncoils is stranger, more difficult to tell, than those valiant accounts of rescuing a ‘forgotten’ woman writer from history’s erasures or of the challenges faced by the woman artist … What is this ecstasy of self-abnegation, what are its costs? She documents this tendency without shame or fear but with curiosity, even amusement. She will retrain her hungers. ‘I could donate my days to finding hers,’ she tells herself, embarking on Ni Chonaill’s story. ‘I could do that, and I will.’ Or so she says. The real woman Ni Ghriofa summons forth is herself.”

–Parul Sehgal ( The New York Times )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Book Reviews

A book review addresses the subject matter of a literary work, and assesses effectiveness and value. Book reviews keep publishers and the public aware of what is being thought and written in a wide range of subjects. When a new book is issued, copies are sent to reviewers; subsequent reviews appear in literary magazines, academic journals, newspapers, and other periodicals. People everywhere depend on book reviews to direct them in their reading; many readers buy what commentators give particular attention. Competent reviewers are the best counselors for readers attempting to keep up with intellectual and aesthetic developments in the literary arts.

Scope: What a Book Review Is and Is Not

Book reviews vary widely. A review does not simply summarize book material, and should not be substituted for the original book. The purpose of a book review is to make known what a literary work purports to do and be, as a publication for both general and specialized readers. Essential components to be taken into account include concerns of subject matter and style. A review is a critical essay, a report and an analysis. Whether favorable or unfavorable in its assessment, it should seem authoritative. The reviewer's competence must be convincing and satisfying. As with any form of writing, the writer of a book review is convincing through thorough study and understanding of the material, and opinions supported by sound reasoning; the reviewer achieves reader satisfaction upon by giving justice to the subject, the book being reviewed, and connecting it with vital human concerns. A review may be limited in its scope due to length requirements, whether those are set by an instructor or an editor. How thoroughly and with respect to what aspects a book is reviewed also depends on instructor or editor preferences, or simply the attitudes and qualifications of the reviewer.

Essential Objectives

A book review should address three issues:

Contents, or what is said in the book.
Style, or how it is said.
Assessment, or analysis of how true and significant the book is.

The most essential preparation for review writing is of course a complete, thoughtful reading of the book. After reading, the reviewer should have a sound, integrated idea of the book contents, and begin to develop attitudes toward style, purpose, and value. As the reviewer forms ideas for the review, certain influences and motives should be considered:

The interests, general or special, of the readers: Are they looking to the review for an elementary, informational report? A more advanced, technical, scholarly address?
The reviewer's own particular interests and purposes: Does the reviewer want to remain primarily a fact-finding reporter? Or are there more specialized ideas and principles of art and ideology the reviewer wants to advance?
Contemporary social, economic, political, and aesthetic issues: Do one or more of these affect the aim or emphasis of the book review? How does the incorporation and interpretation of these issues in the book review further discussion of the book's contents and style?
Required treatment and length requirements: What requirements for the review, emphasis and length, have been set by the instructor or editor?

Material for the Review

As the reviewer decides the scope and content of the review, there are various critical considerations to keep in mind. In addition to content and style, information about the publication and category of the book, and the author and author purpose, may be helpful with analysis. Not all material needs to be included in the final review, but the reviewer should be aware of any relevant issues.

Bibliographical Data

Bibliographical data includes the publisher, place and date of publication, and book price. This information is important for readers who want to buy the book. It may also raise questions: Is the book newly issued? Or is it being reissued? If reissued, is it only a new printing or has it been revised? If revised, what is the nature of the revision? Answers to these questions often can be found in a preface to the book by the author. Consult the front matter of the book, the title and copyright pages, for basic publication information. Often, price, publisher, and page count are listed separately at the beginning or end of a book review; this is the case with the example reviews accompanying this guide.

Classification

There are various categories, or genres, to which a book is assigned: fiction, poetry, travel and adventure, mystery, children's literature, biography, history, and contemporary thought, among others. A reviewer analyzes a book's conformity to a genre with attention to the author's approaches, methods, materials and coverage, and the outcomes of the book as to information, judgments, or interest value. For example, in her review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame , Wendy Rawlings discusses how D'Agata experiments with the form of the essay: "If you're accustomed to reading essays organized around a clearly articulated theme and guided by a single narrative voice that signposts its intentions along the way, D'Agata's methods may frustrate. His essays are disjunctive agglomerations of excerpts from texts of all sorts (literary and otherwise), lists, transcripts from tape-recorded conversations, and, often, long passages of direct quotes from people he meets . . . Reading D'Agata's essays, I felt the strain of someone experimenting with the democratization of a form that, in America, has perhaps been colonized, or at least overpopulated by the ironic and the smug." Rawlings further compares and contrasts D'Agata's methods to those of David Foster Wallace, another contemporary writer of essays. When analyzing a writer's approach to form, some questions to consider are: How does the book differ from previous works in the same field? Has the author written previous books, in this genre or others? How has the author changed or developed? To what extent does the book being reviewed offer anything new its genre? How might it influence later works in the same genre?

Author and Author Purpose

Depending on the genre of the book, the background and purpose of the author may be relevant to the analysis of the book. Refer to the book jacket and biographical notes on the author. Further research may be helpful; read interviews, essays, and, if available, previously written biographies. In John Calderazzo's review of Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , biographical data about Lamberton proves relevant: "Lamberton had an uncommon resume for someone doing serious jail time: no grinding poverty, no drugs or violence. He grew up in Arizona as an avid collector of wild things, a self-taught naturalist . . . He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, married Karen, a fellow lover of the wild, had kids, and decided to share his passions for science and nature in the public schools . . . He became infatuated with a student and, incredibly, ran off with her to Colorado. Soon someone from Mesa recognized them in Aspen and called the police." This background information provides the reason for Lamberton's incarceration as well as the basis for Calderazzo's discussion of the writer's "microscopically detailed prose" and "the single-mindedness of his gaze." The following is a list of possible biographical data about an author to reference in a review:

Race, nationality, and origins-social, cultural, religious, economic, political, environmental.
Training and affiliations-literary, scholastic, religious, political, etc.
Schooling, travel, or other formative influences.
Personal experiences-general or specific.
Career and/or professional position.
Other literary or scholastic works.
Stimulus or occasion for writing.
Special writing aids-illustrations, photographs, diagrams, etc.
General attitude-objective/subjective, formal/informal, authoritative/speculative, etc.
Purpose-as described in a preface or other formal statement, or in some key phrase.
Audience-who the writer hopes will read the book.

Subject Matter

The subject of a book is what the book is about, an idea or ideas explored in the book's contents. In a nonfiction book, the subject should be fairly explicit, in the author's own words. With fiction, however, a reviewer must interpret the subject through analysis of character, setting, plot, and symbolism. A discussion of the subject of a book might begin with its title: From where did the author derive the title? What is the title's meaning or suggestiveness? Is the title an adequate heading for the contents of the book? Or is it ambiguous or false in some way? Other questions regarding the exploration of a book's subject by its author include: What areas of the subject are covered? (In fiction, areas of subject may be considered character concerns, setting, and plot.) What areas of the subject are left uncovered? Is this intentional, or the result of oversight or failure, on the author's part? To what degree is the author thorough or negligent in addressing the subject? In his review of Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo comments that writer Ken Lamberton avoids discussion of personal motivation: "Perhaps to spare his wife further humiliation and pain, Lamberton has decided not to belabor his motive for his one act of insanity. He talks vaguely of immaturity, but that's about it . . . [T]he single-mindedness of his gaze [has] implications he either doesn't recognize or won't fully discuss . . . Fixating on the near at hand may be a necessary metaphor and an undeniable fact of prison life, a way to cope with an existence that certainly scares the hell out of me. Maybe, though, Lamberton's fierce gaze derives from something he'll always carry within him: this edgy and impulsive but obviously grateful husband who knows he's not free to teach again for a living . . ."

The contents of a book revolve around the subject, and develop one or more central ideas. For nonfiction, a reviewer analyzes how well the contents of a book address the central idea, the strength or weakness of supporting ideas, and the relevancy of collateral ideas or implications. In fiction, themes develop through character, setting, and plot; a reviewer evaluates the relative success or lack thereof of these fictional elements. Think about these questions: What is the setting, or place and time, of the story? Does the setting reflect or contrast with characters and plot? Are characters fully or minimally developed? Does character development increase or deteriorate as the action proceeds? Is the plot sequenced chronologically, or otherwise? Does tension build or deflate as the story progresses? Note how David Milofsky discusses the effectiveness of the contents of Reynolds Price's Noble Norfleet : "Although there are spots of lyricism-and for the first third of the book, Price's narrative has the drive and tension of some of his better work-overall, Noble Norfleet sags beneath its unlikely premise and even more unlikely hero . . . It seems likely that Price was trying to say something here about the relationship between sexuality and madness, about the necessity not only of nursing others but of caring for oneself, of showing Noble as some kind of paradigm, hence his name. But, sadly, the novel succeeds in none of these aims." Remember that details about the plot and characters in a book are revealed by the reviewer only to support the purpose of the review. Certainly, a review should not give away a book's ending, nor should it be a simple summary of events and characters. The reviewer's job is not only to report highlights but also to respond to the ideas and techniques evident in the book.

Style refers to how an author relates content through writing. This is an important aspect of a book to review. While initially reading the book, and in any subsequent reads, a reviewer should mark passages of particular resonance and reflection of the author's style. These passages help the reviewer form ideas as to whether or not the style is effective in conveying content, and pleasing to the reader. One or more of these passages may be cited within the review itself in order to both exemplify the author's style and provide basis for the reviewer's response. The following is excerpted from Wendy Rawlings' discussion of John D'Agata's poetic, associative essay-writing style in Halls of Fame: "Juxtaposing so many voices and kinds of language . . . can allow the reader to create exciting associative links between texts and ideas, but it can also, when overused, begin to feel somewhat arbitrary. In the book's title essay, for instance, single sentences and sentence fragments form choppy narratives composed of statements that seem, at times, cruelly separated from each other by the portentous silence of white space. This narrative strategy prevails throughout most of the twenty-four sections of the essay, and as a result, the sentences take on a stilted self-importance, like a poem written by someone as yet unschooled in enjambment." A passage from the essay follows this description. When responding to a literary work, consider these aspects of style:

Logical and reasoned (objective), or imagined and emotional (subjective).
Dramatic and gripping, or pedestrian and level.
Epic and far-reaching, or lyrical and infused with personal poetic emotion.
Solemn and serious, or comic and entertaining.
Spiritual or vulgar or both.
Formal, or familiar, informal.
Simple, or complex.
Broad, or specific.
Abstract, or concrete.
Direct, or implicational.
Figurative, or literal.
Use of detail, sense appeal-the look, sound, smell, taste, feel.
Balance, parallelism, and contrast of exposition, scene, and dialogue.
Allusions, quotations, aphorisms, etc.
To the subject.
To the purpose of the author.
To the reader.

Form and Technique

An author carefully chooses the form and various writing techniques to use to develop ideas. A book reviewer decides whether or not these choices are appropriate and effective. Do certain techniques aid or impede the author's purpose? What passages from the book best exemplify these techniques?

Form and Technique in Nonfiction

Use of source material and authority.
Use of definition; illustrations and examples; comparison and contrast; cause and effect.
Use of generalization and subsequent conclusions.
Tone; authority; approach to subject and audience.
Degree of convincingness.
Worth of proposal; practicality; need.
Comparison with other possible policies.
Costs or difficulties involved.
Ultimate promise, solution, or plan
Methods of deduction or induction.
Synthesis; formation of separate elements into a coherent whole.
Syllogism; major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
Dialectics; arrival at truth through conversation involving question and answer.
Casuistry; determination of right and wrong by applying generalized ethics principles.
Fallacy; begging the question, ignoring the question, etc.

Form and Technique in Fiction

Dominant impression; vividness of final impression.
Selection of details to support a single effect.
Appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel; imagery.
Directness; implication and suggestion.
Point of view; first, second, third; limited or omniscient.
Establishment of setting.
Smoothness of transitions in time sequence.
Use of flashback.
How presented or introduced.
Motivations; sources for feeling and/or drives to action.
How described; direct or implied; revealed through description or dialogue.
Purposes; heroic or villainous; tragic inner flaws; revealing traits.
How credible and consistent.
Opening situation and/or conflict.
Obstacles and complications.
Tension and suspense.
Turning point, or climax.
Resolution.
Degree of inventiveness and/or plausibility.
Final philosophy or view of life derived from characters and action.

Depending on the author's purpose, a book's realism, or truth to life, may need assessment. If a book of fiction is meant to be realistic fiction-is it? Is it logical, natural, plausible? To what extent does the author rely on coincidence or accident to propel the plot? Is there adequate evidence of character motivation? Or a lack of sufficient urges and drives? Is the story infused with a quality of normalcy, or abnormality? Remember, if a book of fiction is to be successful according to a reviewer, it is not necessarily realistic fiction; a book's realism, or lack thereof, need be addressed by a reviewer only as it compares to the author's intention for the story. See here how David Milofsky addresses the realism of William Trevor's novel The Story of Lucy Gault : "It seems unlikely, to say the least, that longtime residents of a place (going back several generations, we're told) would cut off contact so completely as the Gaults do, but, of course, if this isn't the case there would be no novel. Similarly, it's hard to believe that the lawyer wouldn't be able to contrive a way to contact the absent parents . . . It's a tribute to Trevor's genius that these objections are largely overridden and storytelling takes over."

Form and Technique in Poetry

Received (given) forms; sonnet, quatrain, villanelle, sestina, haiku, etc.
Free verse forms.
Lyric; narrative; dramatic; prose; ballad (folk, literary, popular).
Point of view; persona or apparently personal.
Dramatic monologue.
Tone; irony, satire, etc.
Intensity, atmosphere, mood.
Concrete or abstract.
Denotation, connotation, implication.
Vulgar, colloquial/informal, formal.
Syntax, or sentence structure.
Amount and type of sensory detail.
Metaphor; simile; personification; allusion.
Synesthesia; describing a sense impression using words that normally describe another.
Hyperbole or understatement.
Metonymy; substituting one word/phrase for another, closely associated word/phrase.
Synecdoche; using a part to refer to the whole, or the whole to refer to a part.
Alliteration; repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase.
Assonance (repetition of vowels) and/or consonance (repetition of consonants).
Onomatopoeia; using a word that is defined through both its sound and meaning.
Euphony (smooth, pleasant sound) vs. cacophony (rough, harsh sound).
Rhythm (pattern of beats in a stream of sound)-appeals t
The line; end-stopped (self-enclosed) or enjambed.
Feet; iambs, trochees, anapests, dactylics, etc.
Meter; mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, hexa-, etc.
Repetition.
Rhyme (corresponding terminal sounds)-appeals t
True; words sound nearly identical and rhyme on one stressed syllable.
Slant (near/off); words do not exactly rhyme, but almost rhyme.
End rhyme (at end of line) and/or internal rhyme (similar sounds within one line).
Masculine (lines end w/ stressed syllable); feminine (lines end w/ unstressed syllable).

View of Life

It is common for an author to express a view of life through ideas and themes developed in a book. A reviewer identifies and comments on the author's stance. Does the book hold to and/or further develop views apparent in past works? Or make a new statement? Below is a list of popular attitudes, or schools of thought:

Idealism-emphasis on enduring spirituality as opposed to transient values of materialism.
Romanticism-focus on emotion and imagination as freedom from the strictly logical.
Classicism-intellectuality; dominance of the whole over its parts, and form over impulse.
Realism-adherence to actualities, the logistics of everyday life; objectivity.
Impressionism-intuition; sense responses to aesthetic objects.
Naturalism-humans as part of nature; adaption to external environment.

In response to Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo discusses the importance of nature in Ken Lamberton's life and writing: "[I]n the prison of his days (to paraphrase W. H. Auden), Lamberton is helped . . . by nature, by the winds and dust and sweet-smelling raindrops that blow down from the nearby mountains, which he sees framed in barbed wire. This is nature unbound, not just out there beyond the walls but slipping in through the bars, swirling around his cell, penetrating even his skin . . . [Swallows] migrate, then return to raise new young in their mud-packed homes, lending solace-and spice-to the impossibly slow turning of the seasons . . . The swallows and many other break-ins from the natural world are also resources of rehabilitation, which Lamberton says is absent from all other aspects of prison life." If comparisons are to be made between a book being reviewed and its predecessors, a reviewer should be familiar with the basic forms and techniques prevalent in works expressing similar viewpoints. Further research and reading are necessary for the reviewer to form intelligent analysis of views of life expressed through writing.

Value and Significance

Often a book review comments on the significance of a new work. This value may be measured in relation to other books in the same genre, works addressing the same subject matter, past and contemporary authors with a similar style, and/or previous works by the same author. In his review of William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault , David Milofsky compares the novel to Trevor's past works, and comments on its place in literature in general: "[Trevor]'s been called the Irish Chekhov, but that's not really adequate, since Chekhov never really wrote novels. The truth is that Trevor is sui generis, in a class by himself. While his stories (collected a few years ago in an omnibus volume) are brilliant, novels like The Old Boys and Felicia's Journey are lasting contributions to our literature. He's a literary treasure and never less than interesting reading . . . The Story of Lucy Gault may not be the most accomplished novel of Trevor's distinguished career, but that still places it far beyond most of the fiction that will be written in English this year. It's highly recommended reading." Value is also determined by the universality of application-how and to whom the work applies. Are the book's contents of universal interest? Or does the subject matter limit the book's appeal to a narrow field of individuals? Determining the value and significance of a book depends largely on the knowledge and subjectivity of the reviewer; familiarity with comparable books and authors is required to draw conclusions of this nature.

A book's format, or physical make-up, reflects the ideas of both its author and its publisher. A book reviewer might mention characteristics of format, in relation to suitability and aesthetics. Is the book's size convenient? Is the binding durable? Is the print type legible? Do illustrations, diagrams, and maps, if any, aid the reader's understanding of the material? Is the index correct and complete? Are bibliographies and reference lists present? In response to artwork present in Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , John Calderazzo comments on both the exactness of the drawings and the possible meaning of this detail-orientedness to Lamberton's life: "[J]ournal entries and small essays [are] complemented by drawings of tarantulas, conenose beetles, horned lizards, and other desert creatures in almost photo-realistic close-up. This is why I suggested that Lamberton may not find himself any closer to 'nature' when he's finally free. How can he get more intimate? . . . All of his drawings, in fact, are rendered in extreme close-up, like visual infatuations writ large. Nothing seems to exist in the distance, which makes me wonder if anything ever does for Lamberton, or ever will."

Planning and Writing

A book review should meet the requirements of any good composition. Clarity, correctness, readability, and interest are very important. A review should give its readers not only an understanding of the reviewer's intellectual response to a book but also an awareness of the basis for this response, through example and analysis. Specific passages from the book are used to exemplify the reviewer's points regarding elements of style, form, and technique. There is no strict pattern for writing book reviews. Guiding the book reviewer's writing process, however, are the three essential objectives of relating what is said in the book, how it is said, and how true and significant it is. As with the planning of a composition, make a list of possible material to use in the review-ideas, responses, information, examples. Study this material to decide what to include in the book review and what proves extraneous. Put the items to include in a suitable order-for instance, from greater to lesser importance. Once the material is organized, a controlling idea for the review emerges; this controlling idea may form the topic sentence of the review, and provides guidance for achieving coherence and focus throughout. Use the topic sentence, in varied forms, in the beginning and end of the review. Once the book reviewer has chosen the proper and adequate material, organized this material effectively, and decided on the main idea and focus to be developed, it is time to write the review.

Like writing the introduction of a composition, there several possible strategies to use for beginning a book review. One type of strategic beginning is prompt definition-assigning meaning to terms in the title of the book, for example, or giving the scope of the review as it relates to the subject and the reviewer's response to the book. Another effective approach is to highlight the origins and past history of the subject treated in the book; this technique may also be used to introduce ideas about genre, style, or view of life, depending on what the reviewer has chosen as the focus of the review. A statement of exclusion shows what will not be addressed in a review and focuses attention on what really will be discussed. At the beginning of his review of Reynold Price's Noble Norfleet , David Milofsky uses a comparison between Price's newest novel and his previous works: "It would be nice to report that Reynolds Price, the distinguished author of more than thirty books, including A Long and Happy Life and Surface of Earth , has added significantly to his oeuvre with his new novel, but such is not the case. Not by a long shot." A reviewer might also quickly catch reader attention by appealing to human interest-perhaps a personal reference or brief anecdote. The anecdote should connect to or exemplify the main focus of the book review. Note the anecdotal technique Wendy Rawlings uses in the introduction of her review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame : "While on a recent trip to England, I witnessed a cultural exchange that struck me as emblematic of John D'Agata's book of essays, Halls of Fame . An American friend who has spent the past year tolerating a chilly flat in a London suburb for the sake of his British fiancée wanted me to guess the height of the World's Largest Pencil. 'I don't know-eight, nine feet tall?' I said. 'See? See? I knew it!' my friend shouted. He explained that when asked the same question, an English friend had guessed the height of the world's largest pencil to be 'perhaps a foot high, or two.' His modest expectations compared to my great ones (I could not but visualize the World's Largest Pencil as at least a foot taller than an NBA All-Star) represented to my friend something essential about the differences between British and American sensibilities."

Development

The primary focus of a book review is supplied in the beginning paragraph. After this main idea is established, it needs to be developed and justified. Using an organized list of material, the reviewer details the reasons behind the response to the book. References to past history, causes and effects, comparisons and contrasts, and specific passages from the book help illustrate and exemplify this main idea. Personal philosophy and moralization should be kept to a minimum, if included at all; the reader of a book review is interested in unbiased, thoughtful, reasonable, and well-developed ideas pertaining to the book in question. The bulk of a review consists of the development of the reviewer's main idea, the response to the book and the reasons for it. In each of the example reviews that accompany this guide, the reviewers develop their ideas through references to comparable past and contemporary works, analysis of aspects of form and technique, and inclusion of notable passages from the books being reviewed.

Conclusions

The conclusion reflects the focus of the rest of the review, and leaves the reader with a clearly articulated, well-justified final assessment. A restatement of the topic sentence is better than a cursory inspection of less important matters like book format and mechanical make-up. Main emphasis should remain primarily on the qualities and materials of the book being reviewed. At the end of Wendy Rawlings' review of John D'Agata's Halls of Fame , Rawlings summarizes previously stated ideas: "When D'Agata doesn't find the balance, the lyricism borrowed from poetry seems not quite, yet, to fit. I don't wish for D'Agata to join the legions of the smug and ironic, but at certain moments, I begin to wish for authorial presence that will assert itself less forcefully in terms of the arrangement of words on the page, which are often blasted into squadrons separated by asterisks, white space, or unhelpful section headings, and more forcefully on the level of the sentence, as D'Agata does in 'Notes toward the making of a whole human being . . . ,' a five-page essay composed of a single, breathtakingly constructed sentence." The conclusion statement cements the reviewer's recommendation, or lack thereof, of the book. Clearly, this is David Milofsky's aim in the conclusion of his review of Reynold Price's Noble Norfleet : "Even with a failure, it is interesting to read as accomplished a writer as Price, but his new novel cannot be recommended on any other grounds." The final sentence of a review should be both memorable and thought-provoking to the reader. As at the end of John Calderazzo's review of Ken Lamberton's Wilderness and Razor Wire , this final thought might be put in the form of a question: "[R]eading about Lamberton's flawed but exhilarating life makes me wonder about temptation and impetuousness. In light of losing everything, how many of us are still tempted to pursue, just once, some nearby object of desire? And will this constant risk be the prison of all of our days, our lives a landscape of wilderness and razor wire?"

Reviewing Specific Types of Books

The type of book being reviewed raises special considerations as to how to approach the review. Information specific to the categories of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry can be found under the "Form and Technique" heading of this guide. Below are further questions to consider, based on a book's category:

Does the book give a full-length picture of the subject? Focus on only a portion of life?
What phases of the subject's life receive greatest space? Is there justification for this?
What is the point of view of the author?
Are idiosyncrasies and weaknesses omitted? Treated adequately? Overplayed?
Does the author endeavor to get at hidden motives?
What important new facts about the subject's life are revealed in the book?
Is the subject of the biography still living?
What source materials were used in the preparation of the book?
What training has the author had for this kind of work?
What particular historical period does the book address?
Is the accound given in broad outline, or in detail?
Is the style that of reportorial writing, or is there an effort at interpretation?
Is emphasis on traditional matter, like wars, kings, etc.? Or is it a social history?
Are dates used extensively and/or intelligently?
Is the book likely to be out of date soon? Or is it intended to stand the test of time?
Are maps, illustrations, charts, etc., helpful to the reader?
o Who is the author, and what right does he/she have to be writing on the subject? o What contributions to knowledge and understanding are made by the book?
Is the author credible? What is the author's purpose for writing the book?
Does the book contribute to knowledge of geography, government, folklore, etc.?
Does the book have news value?
How effective are plot, pace, style, and characterization? Strengths? Weaknesses?
Is the ending worthwhile? Predictable?
o Children's Literature
o What is the age/interest group for which the book is intended?
o What is the overall experience/feeling of reading the book?
o Is the book illustrated? How? By whom?

Publication

There is a good market for the newcomer in book reviewing. Many editors, including those of big-name magazines, do not like to use the same reviewer too often, and this means unknown, unpublished reviewers have good opportunities to break into the field. Send query letters to editors to find out what their publication needs are. Try smaller, special-interest publications first (ethnic, feminist, religious, etc.); if the reviewer has knowledge or affiliation relevant to the publication, it may increase the chances of a positive response from the editor. Stay current with new books, and read other book reviews. Once an assignment for a review is given, produce timely, quality work, specific to requirements set by the editor. Build publication credits with a variety of periodicals; pursue possibilities of starting a regular column for a single newspaper or magazine. Book reviewing is not generally a highly profitable venture, but money can be made, depending on a reviewer's qualifications, reputation, and dedication to the field.

Cress, Janell. (2003). Book Reviews. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University. https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=49

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2019: Nonfiction

Featuring carmen maria machado, jia tolentino, robert macfarlane, sarah broom, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another year in reading, folks, and as stewards of this venerable repository of literary criticism, it is once again our sacred duty to dust off the abacuses (abaci?) and tabulate the best reviewed books of past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the last two weeks we’ve been revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2019, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography , Poetry , Sci-Fi & Fantasy , Essay Collections , Graphic Literature , Literature in Translation , Short Story Collections , Mystery & Crime , Nonfiction, and Fiction .

Now, for our penultimate roundup of the year, we turn to Nonfiction .

1. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

25 Rave • 11 Positive

“The book itself takes a breathtakingly inventive form … This elaborate architecture could have felt florid, but the headings also help unlock each vignette’s function, like a brushstroke guiding viewers’ eyes around a painting … These shifting angles of illumination achieve a full, strange representation of the subject … Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes In the Dream House a particularly self-aware structure—which is to say, a true haunted house—is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time. Machado seems to anticipate—and even riff on—our skepticism of her tricks … Some of Machado’s preëmptive maneuvers work better than others … Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional … Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional … Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming. She is often said to spin urban legends or fairy tales; her writing, while clear, is full of nameless currents, hidden transactions between pleasure and terror. The result is a space that cannot, even years later, be easily escaped.”

–Katy Waldman ( The New Yorker )

2. Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

26 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“You know a book has entered your bloodstream when the ground beneath your feet, once viewed as bedrock, suddenly becomes a roof to unknown worlds below … If writing books is a form of making maps to guide us through new intellectual territory, Macfarlane is a cartographer of the first order … Macfarlane’s writing is muscular, meticulously researched and lyrical, placing him in the lineage of Peter Matthiessen, Gretel Ehrlich and Barry Lopez. What distinguishes his work is his beginner’s mind, his lack of self-consciousness, his physical pursuit of unlearning what he has been taught by received information … Underland is a book of dares. Macfarlane dares to go deep into earth’s unseen world and illuminate what we not only shy away from but what we don’t even know exists … Underland is a portal of light in dark times. I needed this book of beauty below to balance the pain we’re witnessing aboveground.”

–Terry Tempest Williams ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

19 Rave • 16 Positive

“…announces a major talent in the art of the essay … In an essay titled ‘Always Be Optimizing,’ Tolentino looks at ‘the ideal woman,’ the one you see posting about her workouts, children, and garden on Instagram … Tolentino isn’t mocking such women—she writes (often hilariously) about her own experiences in yoga and barre class and wolfing down yet another chopped salad. What makes the essay more than simple cultural observation is Tolentino’s critique of the economic and societal forces that twist women into such an unsustainable set of contradictions … Pessimism about false promises might turn out to be the cultural legacy of Tolentino’s generation, the much-maligned millennials. The best essays in the collection aim directly at these outrages—the few that stray from it tend to work less well … If anything can save us, it just might be the snap of Tolentino’s humor, the eloquence of her skepticism.”

–Kate Tuttle ( The Boston Globe )

4. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

16 Rave • 10 Positive

“…[an] extraordinary, engrossing debut … Broom…pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms. Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large … Broom is our guide, but not the sort who holds readers’ hands, uninterested as she is in tidy transitions between one type of writing and another. The through line is her thought process, her frequent questioning … The interviews also yield unforgettable scenes … The true test of her worthiness is her empathy and focused attention. She is a responsible historian, granting her subjects the grace of multiple examinations over the years … Broom’s deadpan humor comes through clearest in her descriptions of herself … The Yellow House is a book that triumphs much as a jazz parade does: by coming loose when necessary, its parts sashaying independently down the street, but righting itself just in the nick of time, and teaching you a new way of enjoying it in the process.”

–Angela Flournoy ( The New York Times Book Review )

5. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

15 Rave • 9 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Esmé Weijun Wang’s new book of essays… warrants much of the hype and anticipation surrounding it … Wang is a highly articulate and graceful essayist, and her insights, in both the clinical and general senses, are exceptional … [Wang’s] perspective in The Collected Schizophrenias is encyclopedic and prismatic even without taking into account how her primary mental illness may have fractured her identity … [Wang] writes with clarity about how it feels when a psychotic episode descends upon her, an experience only a fraction of us will ever have … These essays are mesmerizing and at times bittersweet … The Collected Schizophrenias is a necessary addition to a relatively small body of literature, but it’s also, quite simply, a pleasure to read. The prose is so beautiful, and the recollection and description so vivid, that even if it were not mostly about an under-examined condition it would be easy to recommend.”

–Katharine Coldiron ( The Los Angeles Review of Books )

6. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

12 Rave • 11 Positive • 4 Mixed

“Casey Cep has picked up where Lee left off: She’s written the true-crime story that Harper Lee never figured out how to write … It’s one measure of just how rich Casey Cep’s material is, and how artfully she handles it, that I have given away only about a tenth of the interest and delight contained within just the first third or so of her book. She reminded me all over again how much of good storytelling is leading the reader to want to know the things you are about to tell him, while still leaving him to feel that his interest was all his idea. By the time I got to the section on Harper Lee, I wanted to know more about her than I’ve ever thought I wanted to know … Furious Hours builds and builds until it collides with the writer who saw the power of Maxwell’s story, but for some reason was unable to harness it. It lays bare the inner life of a woman who had a world-class gift for hiding … it’s in her descriptions of another writer’s failure to write, that [Cep’s] book makes a magical little leap, and it goes from being a superbly written true-crime story to the sort of story that even Lee would have been proud to write.”

–Michael Lewis ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. Working by Robert A. Caro

8 Rave • 18 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a slim volume, but when readers come to the end, they might wish it had gone on as long as the colossal masterworks for which the historian is celebrated … delightful … While stories of Caro’s investigative achievements are astonishing, the nuts-and-bolts details of his research and writing process are charming … The humility, the tenacity, the ardent desire to make his readers truly understand a subject, the decades spent taking care to produce something masterful and meaningful—all of it stands in stark contrast to the more punishing aspects of our information cycle. We might not deserve Robert Caro, but we’re certainly lucky to have him.”

–Barbara Spindel ( The Barnes & Noble Review )

8. Know My Name by Chanel Miller

16 Rave • 3 Positive

“… the product of rigorous writerly attention … If Know My Name had been shaped in these slicker forms—a corrective, a tell-all—readers sympathetic to Miller would have readily received her rage, whatever her tone. But Miller situates victimhood as a conduit to expertise, and trauma as a mode of human insight … Miller is a gifted storyteller who establishes her authority by stacking details, setting scenes … she observes her own ordeal by adopting the stance of a reporter, a media critic, and an activism-minded theorist. She is heartbreakingly resourceful, marshalling her subjectivity as evidence of a system set up to protect the potential of a boy like Turner … contains a forceful critique of the complicity of liberal institutions like Stanford, which seem more afraid of upsetting sensibilities than they are concerned with doing right by survivors like Miller … Miller’s writing début may have been precipitated by her assault, but the final work devitalizes its horrific beginnings. No narrative is as persuasive as Miller’s. There is no more self-effacing sobriety, no more conclusions plastering confusion and fury. Know her name, know her voice.”

–Doreen St. Félix ( The New Yorker )

9. Coventry by Rachel Cusk

11 Rave • 10 Positive • 4 Mixed

“…a sharp new miscellany … Cusk’s first collection of essays. It also contains some book reviews and introductions, but her heart does not seem in them. She mediates between her mind and the external world with a precision and agility that mostly goes missing when she mediates between texts … [the essays] are first-rate, marked by candor and seriousness, and they’re familiar … Her writing about parenting is discerning and granular … Cusk’s essays are subtle; they do not announce their intentions through a megaphone. She feels her way into her topics and she will not be hurried. You read her for her riddling questions, not whatever answers might pop out at the end. She is often ambivalent, but never neutral in the self-protective modern manner. She is a poet of split feelings. Her inquisitive intelligence is the rebar that, inside the concrete, holds the edifice upright.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

10. Our Man: Richard Holbroke and the End of the American Century by George Packer

15 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan

“I doubt that any novel, not even one co-written by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. But now one has. George Packer’s Our Man portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory: relentless, ambitious, voracious, brilliant, idealistic, noble, needy and containing multitudes. It’s both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy, with Holbrooke strutting and fretting his hour on the stage … the book overflows with the trait that was Holbrooke’s saving grace: an in-your-face intellectual honesty that is not tainted, as Holbrooke’s was, by his manipulativeness. The result is so bracing that Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.”

–Walter Isaacson ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

T he best nonfiction books of the year dug deep, mining both personal and global history to uncover essential truths. John Vaillant captured the horrors of a wildfire to study the consequences of climate change. Matthew Desmond dissected how poverty persists in the United States and made a compassionate call for greater equity. Tracy K. Smith detailed her complicated mission to learn more about her ancestry and urged us to examine whose stories we deem worth preserving. Their books are among the most impactful nonfiction published in 2023. Here, the 10 best books of the year.

More: Read TIME's lists of the best songs , albums , movies , TV shows , podcasts and video games of 2023.

10. King, Jonathan Eig

In the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr . in decades, journalist Jonathan Eig paints a complex and fully human portrait of an American leader. Drawing on newly released FBI files, telephone transcripts, and more, Eig presents King like he’s never been seen before. The author unveils this research in fresh and exciting turns, unpacking the activist’s public work alongside his private life. King is a nuanced new look at a civil rights icon.

Buy Now: King on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Fire Weather , John Vaillant

At the center of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather is a horrific real-life story that serves as a deafening wake-up call. The book traces the events of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, in which 88,000 Canadians were displaced after their homes and neighborhoods were destroyed in a fiery blaze over the course of just one afternoon. In describing the natural disaster, Vaillant breaks down the science in accessible terms and offers an important account of the consequences of climate change.

Buy Now: Fire Weather on Bookshop | Amazon

8. Liliana's Invincible Summer , Cristina Rivera Garza

For three decades, poet Cristina Rivera Garza has been haunted by her sister’s murder. In July 1990, Liliana, an architecture student living in Mexico City who loved swimming and cinema, was killed. Though an arrest warrant was filed for Liliana’s ex-boyfriend, he disappeared during the investigation. So, in 2019, Rivera Garza decided to seek answers to what happened to her beloved sister herself. She recounts her quest for information and justice, and uses her sister’s story to tell a larger one about domestic violence and femicide .

Buy Now: Liliana's Invincible Summer on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Poverty, By America , Matthew Desmond

In 2017, sociologist Matthew Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize for Evicted, which analyzed why so many American families were facing eviction in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. His latest book revisits similar themes, this time focusing on why poverty is so prevalent in the U.S . With an empathetic hand, he writes about the systems that keep Americans from living above the poverty line, and implores us all to fight for ways to bring prosperity to the masses.

Buy Now: Poverty, By America on Bookshop | Amazon

More: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

6. How to Say Babylon, Safiya Sinclair

As a child growing up in Jamaica, Safiya Sinclair had to adhere to her Rastafarian father’s strict rules, which governed everything from the clothes she wore to the people she was allowed to see. But the author managed to educate herself on other ways of living and decided to use her voice to break free. In her memoir, Sinclair captures her turbulent coming of age, and how she grappled with realizing that the traditions she was raised in were suffocating her. The result is a moving portrait of a woman’s self-empowerment.

Buy Now: How to Say Babylon on Bookshop | Amazon

5. You Could Make This Place Beautiful , Maggie Smith

After her marriage falls apart, Maggie Smith inspects the pieces of the life she once knew to pave a path forward. You Could Make This Place Beautiful finds Smith dissecting the very form in which she is writing as she constantly questions the purpose of memoir and the stories we tell ourselves. Mining her heartbreak and memories both with her husband and without him, Smith moves between rage, sorrow, and grief. And through it all, she illustrates her unwavering love for her son and daughter.

Buy Now: You Could Make This Place Beautiful on Bookshop | Amazon

4. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama , Nathan Thrall

In February 2012, 5-year-old Milad Salama boarded a bus with his fellow Palestinian classmates en route to a theme park. But he never made it there. The bus crashed outside Jerusalem, and the children aboard it were injured or killed. This devastating scene propels Nathan Thrall’s book , which follows Milad’s father Abed from his first romance to the day of the collision, all told against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . Thrall tackles the subject with care and expertise, introducing the lives of several Israelis and Palestinians to illuminate their struggles and complex histories.

Buy Now: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama on Bookshop | Amazon

3. To Free the Captives , Tracy K. Smith

In her memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith crafts a searing narrative about being Black in America. She excavates her past to better understand the racial violence that persists today, wading through generations of her family’s history. But as she tries to learn more about her lineage, beginning with the Alabama town where her father grew up, Smith realizes that the research process itself is fraught and riddled with missing pieces.

Buy Now: To Free the Captives on Bookshop | Amazon

2. Doppelganger, Naomi Klein

What would you do if all of a sudden people started mixing you up with a person whose beliefs you can’t stand? Leftist activist and author Naomi Klein has been forced to answer this exact question: she is constantly confused with Naomi Wolf, who has spent the past few years spreading antivaccine rhetoric and fringe conspiracy theories. Klein investigates how “other Naomi” became the type of public figure she is today, taking a dizzying trip through the current cultural landscape to examine politics, misinformation, and the slippery path to radicalization.

Buy Now: Doppelganger on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Some People Need Killing , Patricia Evangelista

The title of Patricia Evangelista’s memoir is rooted in a conversation the journalist once had with a vigilante who made that unnerving declaration. Her home country, the Philippines, was full of people who shared the same belief as this man—like those working for the state, who carried out thousands of killings of citizens during President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Evangelista tells the stories of those who were lost in the struggle, and interrogates the language we use to describe violence.

Buy Now: Some People Need Killing on Bookshop | Amazon

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Book Reviews

A 19th-century bookbinder struggles with race and identity in 'the library thief'.

Keishel Williams

The examination of race and identity can be seen throughout literature, and increasingly today.

In her debut novel, The Library Thief , Kuchenga Shenjé explores these concepts — and the associated expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized. Shenjé delves into the past in this work of historical fiction, posing inquiries about Black people's lives in the Victorian era.

In this 19th-century English story, Florence, an ambitious bookbinder, is expelled from her family home by her harsh and unforgiving father for being with a young man. Florence, a clever and savvy woman, persuades Lord Francis Belfield to let her stay at Rose Hall manor by promising to restore the priceless books in his library in time for an impending sale, assuring him that she is just as skilled as her father. Among Lord Belfield's minimal staff, Florence stands out as an educated, liberal woman.

But Florence is not as polished as she wants her new acquaintances to believe. Being raised by a single father and not knowing her mother, whom she was told is dead, has fostered an emptiness in Florence she thought she could fill with books. She's adrift and feels unloved. This fragile foundation is fertile ground for the harrowing experiences Florence faces during her stay at the manor.

Florence arrives at Rose Hall to find that Lord Banfeild's wife has died, and the new widower is beside himself with grief. Immediately, Florence finds herself in the middle of a tightly woven plot of family secrets and lies that conveniently shroud the lives of the upper class. She becomes fixated on Lady Persephone's death and starts investigating suspicious activities around it. During her investigation, she uncovers some dark Banfield family secrets, which include violence, abuse, and "passing" family members. This journey of discovery forces Florence to confront her own identity and the mysteries surrounding her life.

Some characters in this novel intentionally or unintentionally pass as white because they find it easier than living as a Black person in Victorian England. While the topic of "passing" is frequently explored in literature set in the 1920s and 30s, Shenjé delves into what it means to be a Black person passing in the 19th century. She explores this theme in multiple ways: One character completely abandons their family to live as a white man, another maintains contact with her family but uses her husband's wealth and influence to hide in plain sight, and the third, and perhaps most intriguing, character lives as a white person without knowing they were actually Black.

Florence is uncertain about her own race, and she passionately advocates for the rights of Black people. She often becomes offended by the viewpoints of her friends, neighbors, and even their pastor towards Black people. Florence grew up in a white community and had limited interactions with Black people, other than through books until she met Lady Persephone's lady's maid — a beautiful, charming, and highly educated Black woman. "How could a whole sector of humanity once viewed as animals now be writing books and teaching universities and the like? We had been lied to," she says after a particularly awful sermon propagating the inferiority of African people.

At times, Shenjé's use of language attempting at inclusivity fails to achieve what appears to be the intended effect. The discussion of gender roles in a highly complex way seems forced and unrealistic. This is especially so when such language and philosophizing are attributed to certain characters in particular.

While The Library Thief doesn't exactly break new ground when it comes to exploring issues of race and identity, it does have some entertaining elements. Wesley is a standout character who should have received more attention. If a movie adaptation of the character were ever to happen, Patrick Walshe McBride would be an excellent choice to play the part. Shenjé also did an fantastic job planting hints throughout the story that lead to the main character's true identity. The best part of the book is the unexpected twist at the end that ties up the murder mystery. Kudos to Shenjé for that surprise ending.

Keishel Williams is a Trinidadian American book reviewer, arts & culture writer, and editor.

The John Maytham Book Review Afternoon Drive with John Maytham

Listen to John Maytham's weekly book reviews and share his passion for all things literary. From fiction to non-fiction, John reads and reviews a range of books that would sit well on your reading list. On the list this week: The Chase by Emma Glass Long Island by Colm Toibin The Near North by Ivan Vladislavic See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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It’s a happy coincidence that we recommend Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection “All Things Are Too Small” — a critic’s manifesto “in praise of excess,” as her subtitle has it — in the same week that we also recommend Justin Taylor’s maximalist new novel “Reboot,” an exuberant satire of modern society that stuffs everything from fandom to TV retreads to the rise of conspiracy culture into its craw. I don’t know if Rothfeld has read Taylor’s novel, but I get the feeling she would approve. Maybe you will too: In the spirit of “more, bigger, louder,” why not pick those up together?

Our other recommendations this week include a queer baseball romance novel, an up-to-the-minute story about a widower running for the presidency of his local labor union, a graphic novelist’s collection of spare visual stories and, in nonfiction, a foreign policy journalist’s sobering look at global politics in the 21st century. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

REBOOT Justin Taylor

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

“His book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America complete with its own highly imagined myths, yet one still rooted in the Second Great Awakening and the country’s earliest literature. It’s a performance full of wit and rigor.”

From Joshua Ferris’s review

Pantheon | $28

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY Cat Sebastian

When a grieving reporter falls for the struggling baseball player he’s been assigned to write about, their romance is like watching a Labrador puppy fall in love with a pampered Persian cat: all eager impulse on one side and arch contrariness on the other.

“People think the ending is what defines a romance, and it does, but that’s not what a romance is for. The end is where you stop, but the journey is why you go. … If you read one romance this spring, make it this one.”

From Olivia Waite’s romance column

Avon | Paperback, $18.99

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL: Essays in Praise of Excess Becca Rothfeld

A striking debut by a young critic who has been heralded as a throwback to an era of livelier discourse. Rothfeld has published widely and works currently as a nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post; her interests range far, but these essays are united by a plea for more excess in all things, especially thought.

“Splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda — to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties. … A carnival of high-low allusion and analysis.”

From David Gates’s review

Metropolitan Books | $27.99

THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War Jim Sciutto

Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days and hours ahead of Russia’s invasion to the waters of the Taiwan Strait where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. It’s a book that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.

“Enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter. … The stuff of unholy nightmares.”

From Scott Anderson’s review

Dutton | $30

THE SPOILED HEART Sunjeev Sahota

Sahota’s novel is a bracing study of a middle-aged man’s downfall. A grieving widower seems to finally be turning things around for himself as he runs for the top job at his labor union and pursues a love interest. But his election campaign gets entangled in identity politics, and his troubles quickly multiply.

“Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence. … A plot-packed, propulsive story.”

From Caoilinn Hughes’s review

Viking | $29

SPIRAL AND OTHER STORIES Aidan Koch

The lush, sparsely worded work of this award-winning graphic novelist less resembles anything recognizably “comic book” than it does a sort of dreamlike oasis of art. Her latest piece of masterful minimalism, constructed from sensuous washes of watercolor, pencil, crayon and collage, pulses with bright pigment and tender melancholy.

“Many of these pages are purely abstract, but when Koch draws details, it’s in startlingly specific and consistent contours that give these stories a breadth of character as well as depiction.”

From Sam Thielman’s graphic novels column

New York Review Comics | $24.95

Explore More in Books

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

The complicated, generous life of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

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

Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic

A literary critic’s take on the South Dakota governor’s memoir, “No Going Back.”

Toward the end of Fred Gipson’s 1956 classic, “Old Yeller,” Travis says, “It was going to kill something inside me to do it, but I knew then that I had to shoot my big yeller dog.”

Reading that scene again yesterday, damn if I wasn’t struck by the same storm of tears that overtook me in seventh grade. It’s a devastating moment, full of anguish, permanently embedded in the memory of anyone who’s read the novel or seen the movie.

If this week is any guide, a dog-killing scene will be permanently embedded in our memories of Kristi Noem, too. On Tuesday, the South Dakota governor published a political memoir called “ No Going Back .” But days before it appeared, everyone on planet Earth already knew about the passage in which Noem describes shooting her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket .

What you can’t get from the 24/7 worldwide freakout, though, is how strange Cricket’s summary execution feels in context. That grisly story pops up in a chapter called “Will the World Awaken?” — right after Noem describes how much Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wanted to meet her and right before she lays out a series of clichés called “The Noem Doctrine” — e.g. “Fight to win.”

In the fight with Cricket, Noem won the battle but lost the war . Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Republican garden gnome Karl Rove called “No Going Back” an act of “stunning self-destruction.” As Donald Trump considers whom to pick for his vice president, “bragging about shooting her puppy in a gravel pit ended her hopes of being selected.”

As a literary critic, I must object. The description of Cricket’s Last Stand is the one time in this howlingly dull book that Noem demonstrates any sense of setting, character, plot and emotional honesty. Otherwise, it’s mostly a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge.

And far too many people have been obsessing about Noem’s fantastical tête-à-tête with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Come on — who among us hasn’t mistakenly believed that we once faced down the leader of the Hermit Kingdom? As I told Joseph Stalin, “We all make mistakes.”

But the central moment in Noem’s memoir is that transcendent scene of South Dakota gothic.

Picture it: Harvest season, “the Super Bowl of farming.” But it’s hunting season at their lodge, too. “Balancing both at full throttle is enough to break a family,” Noem says. She does everything possible to make sure friends from Georgia bag some pheasants, but Cricket — “out of her mind with excitement” — ruins everything. “I was livid,” Noem writes.

Then, on the way home from that disaster, Cricket attacks some beloved, irreplaceable chickens at a neighbors’ house. The mother — holding a baby, no less! — runs toward the melee, sobbing: “My chickens! No, not my chickens!” Noem pays for the birds and hauls Cricket into her truck. “She whipped around to bite me,” she says. “I hated that dog.”

Once home, Noem leads Cricket to the gravel pit and dispatches her. Then she spots a smelly old billy goat that she wants to kill, too. The first shot goes awry. She has to run across the pasture for more bullets “to finish the job.”

Construction workers taking a coffee break at her house witness all this carnage. “When they saw me heading their way,” Noem writes, “they put their cups down, got up and went back to work — in a real hurry.”

Gripping, right? Disturbing, even. Forget Travis and his beloved yellow cur. For a few glorious pages, Noem feels like a Flannery O’Connor character with tax cuts. Honestly, as someone who had to endure all 260 pages of “No Going Back,” I wish Noem had shot more dogs — or me.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “ CBS Sunday Morning .”

No Going Back

The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward

By Kristi Noem

Center Street. 272 pp. $30

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How to Write a Nonfiction Book Review
Be succinct, but give enough to serve the purpose of the review. Points to Consider: What if you really don't like the book? Always write your reviews with integrity. If you honestly don't like a book, write your review as if you are in a critique session with the author. Use positive words and avoid sarcasm.
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The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

10. King, Jonathan Eig

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