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How to write an academic book review

Note: this guide is for writing the 500-750 word “academic summary” review. Some of these suggestions are helpful for longer reviews or review essays, though those are much more about making an argument about the book or historiography.

What do you do if you’re unsure whether you need to read that new book about rats in revolutionary Paris or the untold story of Jefferson’s wig? You look for reviews. In particular, you seek the academic summary kind, a 500-750 word overview that tells a busy reader what is at the book’s heart. Writing these summaries isn’t the most glamorous job, but they grease the wheels of the historical profession. Below are some suggestions on how to write academic reviews as painlessly as possible.

A good review starts with careful reading and economical note-taking. Somewhere during my preparation for general exams I stopped actually reading. Mostly, I skim. That’s no good for this. As a reviewer, you owe it to the author to read everything carefully and check the footnotes. However, don’t take an overabundance of notes. Be on the lookout for a few key quotations from every chapter. I like to write a 2-3 sentence summary of each chapter after I’m done reading it. Keep a broad perspective; you don’t want to lose the forest for the trees.

When it comes time to write the review, think about what the reader wants. Generally, it’s a short overview of the subject and argument followed by a slightly expanded discussion of some particularly interesting key themes and then an overall assessment. That’s it.

To do that, open with a short hook describing an interesting nugget or anecdote from the book. A well chosen opening like this should ideally reflect the book’s focus or argument and therefore give the reader a sense of the book’s flavor. Then you pivot to a one-to-two paragraph overview. Tell us the book’s subject, argument, and importance. Use at most two quotes; you don’t want to bury the reader. Then you want a paragraph on an interesting theme of the book (this one should be pretty positive). The next paragraph or so can raise another theme, with an eye toward constructive criticism or engagement with the book’s ideas. This is where you can get a bit into your analytic take / perspective. By this point readers expect a little of that. Then you end with a paragraph (or even a few sentences) providing an overall assessment of the importance or relevance of the book. Bam! You’re done.

General tips:

Reviews of this kind are somewhat formulaic. This is not the time to experiment with form. Readers of this kind of review are looking for a summary. If you want to write one of those reviews that is more about the human condition than the book in question, save it for the LRB/NYRB/LARB.

The first few paragraphs are an overview. Be faithful to the author’s argument, and keep your (brief) analytic take for later in the review.

Now is not the time to dump on a bad book. Be charitable. Raise legitimate criticisms constructively. Even bad books have useful information and content for other scholars.

Don’t nitpick. It’s lazy and stupid. None of us devote years of our lives to the copy-editing. Engage with the ideas.

You should write a few of these a year. You owe it to the profession!

For an example of a few reviews, here’s one I wrote for the Kentucky Historical Register and (slightly longer) one for H-NET.

How to (quickly) write a lecture

I am now in my fourth consecutive semester of running new classes and I think I’ve figured out a pretty good system for writing lectures quickly. It is by no means perfect (as the linked slides and outline below reveal), but it gets the job done and has helped me make the most of my time.

(1) Write your lecture the day before.

This is scary the first few times, but will save you a lot of time and anxiety in the long-run. The other advantage is that the material is fresh in your mind, so you can extemporize well and you remember your notes. If you’re too nervous to try this the very first time, try writing your lecture well in advance, but in 24 hours. You will, however, really need to believe the deadline for this to work.

Regarding content, if you don’t know what you should be lecturing about, start by reading a textbook. The point is to get a sense of the key events, incidents, and people for the relevant period. Then find one or two key monographs to get some ideas for lecture themes. If there really isn’t a relevant textbook, find 2-3 monographs on the lecture topic. Read their introductions and reviews, and you’ll have the same list of key events, incidents, people, and arguments. The point is to spend ~2 hours at the beginning reviewing this material and compiling a rough list on paper. Take this list and try to break it into relevant parts using the structure described below. When it comes to finding images, wikipedia / wikimedia commons is your friend. As is google image search. Try to be more original than simply getting the top image for the relevant wikipedia article (though I’m at times guilty of this).

(2) Use bullet points, do not write out a talk.

This saves a huge amount of time. It also avoids the dreaded problem of having WAY too much information. Lectures should be lean, otherwise the students get swamped. Ideally, a slide should have three to four relevant bullet points (and these can have a few sub-points). Anything more, and you’d be better off either streamlining things a bit more or adding a new slide. In my bulleted outline, I generally indicate a new slide with brackets and in bold: [SLIDE TITLE]. Makes it easy to see, especially if it’s buried in some larger outline point.

(3) Have a clear structure that you use every lecture.

This helps the students with note-taking. It also makes life easier for you. Below is the structure I use. It could be improved, but I find it covers the rights bases of keeping it interesting, being clear, and providing the key information. This is based on a 90 minute lecture; for shorter lectures, I’d probably do two “content chunks” and one student discussion topic halfway through:

1. [Announcements] Tell the students about updated readings, due dates, etc. This is a boring necessity, so get it out of the way immediately.

2. [Hook] An anecdote or story to introduce the topic and lecture themes.

3. [Overview] Signposting is key. I generally have a three point overview.

4. [Content chunk 1] Any number of slides, lecture for 30 minutes or so.

5. [Discussion Q] No matter how good you are, your students are now bored. So put a slide with some sort of discussion question. These don’t have to be complicated or deep historical questions, in fact, you want something the students can latch on to. This is as much about refocusing them and getting out some energy as being a pedagogical exercise. If you really can’t think of anything, often an image to interpret/discuss is a good way to get the audience involved.

6. [Content chunk 2] Back at it for 30 minutes or so.

7. [Discussion Q] At the ~60 minute mark, they’re bored again. You need a short discussion to refocus.

8. [Content Chunk 3] Last piece of lecture.

9. [Contextualizing the reading] Be sure to explicitly link the lecture to the readings, the students don’t always connect the dots. How you do this will vary by course format, but make an effort.

10. [Conclusions] Remind them about the key takeaways.

11. [Key terms / dates] I always end with a list of key terms and a short (6 date) timeline. Helps a lot for review and their notes.

12. [Additional reading] I like to suggest three books if they’re interested in more detail. These are academic. Very very occasionally I recommend fiction, a film, or documentary.

13. [Next lecture or week] Set up the next one!

Finally, post the slides online in advance if you can and I like to make a sheet with the lecture’s key quotations. A sample set of slides is here. The outline is here. It’s a lecture I gave on the Columbian Exchange for the early part of a course on colonial America. In preparation, I read a relevant chapter from a textbook on the history of the Americas and combined that with ideas/material from Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Virginia Anderson’s Creatures of Empire. Note that this material is not edited for this post, so they’re a bit rough, which is to say, they’re realistic. The day of lecture I also review the printed outline and sometimes make changes/corrections in pen, so the actual lecture may have been very slightly different. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but the lecture went well and I followed the rules here (though I wrote it before I appreciated the value of contextualizing the tutorial/section readings).

Note on outline length: This is more of a question of feel, so it’s hard to give an abstract estimate. You’ll figure it out in the first few lectures. But if you’re curious, all of my lectures are 90 minutes (more like 80 if you include class change time) and my lecture outlines vary in length, but are usually around 2,400-2,600 words. That includes a few quotes (when I have many long quotes—generally to be avoided—it can push 3000) and student discussion time, which of course complicates things a bit. Your mileage will vary.

Okja’s contribution to animal studies; or, how Fido makes it easier to eat a hamburger

In a key scene in the film Okja, we see a young girl named Mija walking with her genetically-engineered superpig friend, Okja, as tens of thousands of nameless beasts watch through a feedlot fence. Director Bong Joon-ho is asking viewers to reflect on what separates Okja from her fellow species and whether the distinction is significant. Okja is the tale of a relationship between a young girl and an animal, but it is also an exploration of capitalist food production, genetically modified organisms, and animal rights. The divide the film explores, between the animals with which we develop bonds of affection and those we butcher and eat has not always existed, and it both enables industrial animal husbandry, and constitutes one of its critical weaknesses.

People today largely categorize domesticated animals into two groups, those that are individuated and with personality, i.e. our pets, and those that only exist as part of an undifferentiated mass that we eat or turn into coats. This distinction is not merely about feelings. It has real world implications. Pets are protected by cruelty laws; livestock are not. Often, but not always, this line is divided by species: cats are pets, turkeys are food. The systems of modern animal husbandry are designed to police this boundary. Few consumers could have any direct familiarity with the animals that become their food even they wanted to and video-recording slaughterhouses is illegal in many places. Slaughterhouse workers—themselves thought of in similarly abstract and faceless terms—do the actual killing. These boundaries absolve us of responsibility for the treatment of the animals we eat. The fact that we love Fluffy makes it easier to draw a circle around animals with which we don’t develop affective relationships.

Though this divide largely promotes indifference to the well-being of livestock, Okja reveals how our love for individual animals can mobilize opposition to industrial animal husbandry. In the film, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) fights the attempt to popularize the superpig as the meat of the future. When they distribute undercover footage of the abuse of the superpigs in a secret laboratory, they rely on the affective connection people feel when confronted with the suffering of a fellow mammal. Though we are meant to sympathize with the ALF’s goals, the characters do not escape the director’s satire; one character is perpetually woozy from his reluctance to eat almost anything and Paul Dano plays a surprisingly violent animal defender.

On the whole, the movie plays on the sense of empathy and collective outrage people today feel when actually confronted with the workings of industrial husbandry on individual animal bodies. However, for both the film and the ALF characters in it, this approach put critics of animal husbandry in a bind. Connection with individual animals builds empathy and support for reform, but without requiring popular commitment to clear plans for change. It puts the focus on individuals and relationships, when the problems of animal husbandry are about the broader social and economic system—the forces that create the pen filled with thousands of nameless creatures.

Of course the idea that caring about an animal and eating it are necessarily at odds is not a universal assumption, but one borne of the increasing separation (physically and conceptually) between us and the production of our food. The movie hints at this reality through Mija’s grandfather, who cares for and about Okja, but also sends her off to be slaughtered. He soon reacts with surprise at the intensity of his grand-daughter’s outrage. Though we might similarly condemn his decision, his response suggests working with or even eating animals does not preclude caring about them. This tell us that there might be ways to promote animal husbandry reform without relying on the pet/livestock paradigm that dominates popular opinion today.

As Mija and Okja flee the feedlot to which Okja was sent, two animals from the doomed herd engineer the escape of a piglet—presumably their child. Our protagonists take it back home and it is later frolicking in a lush forest. In the end, the special bond between Mija and Okja survives, and they seem (mostly) untroubled by the fact that consumers worldwide are munching on superpig jerky. The film is not entirely clear whether this absolves us from, or implicates us in, the fate of the remaining animals to which we do not give names.

tl;dr review of the film: mostly only okay, the ending is pretty good. Punctuated with some quality superpig toilet humor, it’s one of those movies that, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss, is good to stink with.

Giving conference papers and presentations: a short guide

Note: this is the text from a guide I made for grad students preparing to give their first conference paper. Here is a pdf of the handout this draws from.

Below are my key suggestions to giving a strong presentation. General tips are on the reverse. People engage with presentations fundamentally differently from written work. This is a curse and a blessing; when listening to a presentation, people have a harder time following dense analysis, but they are better at thinking big picture.

Structure

Hook: An anecdote or example that draws the reader in and embodies your argument. It, along with the title, will explain the focus of the paper.
Overview: Summarizes what you’re saying and why we should care.
Content: This is the body of your talk.
Conclusion: Reiterates your overview. Also (can) introduce bigger questions.

Few talks actually follow this clear a format. As a result, audiences are generally bored, confused, or both.

Clarity

Talks should never, ever, be dense. You want people able to follow you. Generally this means that you can only speak to one key theme or idea. Ask yourself: “what one thing do I want my audience to take away from this?” At most, they’re only going to remember one thing from your talk anyways.
People are distracted, so repetition is always good. In writing, repeating identical phrases can be a bad thing, but it’s actually important in a talk. Similarly, signposting is vital. Don’t be afraid to say “my argument is…”, or “in conclusion…”.

Performance

A conference paper is a performance. Therefore, you need to think about how to communicate your ideas in an engaging way.

Think about your audience. A presentation for specialists looks different from a presentation for a general academic audience, which looks different from a talk at the local retirement communication.
All good performances start with practice. Be sure to practice your talk, including questions (if you have a partner).
Enthusiasm goes a long way. Think about what makes you excited about your topic and how to communicate that to your audience. When answering questions, be excited and interested. This saves you when you don’t know the answer; saying something like “I hadn’t thought about that,” or “I need to think about that more,” makes the questioner feel good and makes people more willing to share their thoughts. It does not make you look unprepared.

Minor suggestions

Design:

Slides are a good, but they should have as few words as possible on them (5-7 at most!). Anything more overwhelms the listener and they will ignore you and focus on the text.
A slide should only be up for 1-2 minutes. This helps pace your presentation.
If you want to wait a long time before switching slides, consider putting up a blank slide. This also refocuses the listener.
Images keep a listener engaged. Any topic has relevant images; if you only include a few, keep the previous tip in mind.

Presentation:

Practice, practice, practice. Say your talk to yourself. If you’ve written the talk, read it aloud to yourself. Practice with a friend and do simulated questions. Practice!
Talking from a script vs. bullet points / notes: both approaches work well. It’s actually often harder to give a good talk from a written script because it’s hard to write how people talk. Talking from notes forces you to think more schematically, which is good. That said, I’ve seen masterful examples of both.
Be comfortable. Dressing professionally is important, but make sure you don’t feel uncomfortable in what you’re wearing. This might mean practicing in what you’re going to wear or wearing something similar the day before, even around the house.
If you’re nervous, getting to the room early can often help. Try chatting with other people on the panel or other people in the room, this helps build a connection with the audience and can make you less nervous.
On that point, feeling nervous is completely normal. It will get less acute over time.

Argument / content:

Talks are the best place to trial new ideas. You get high-level feedback and you only need a few illustrative examples rather than a wealth of evidence.
Dense historiographic analyses can work for talks, but only if that’s the central focus of your talk and your audience is very specialized. Otherwise its too hard to follow.
People love lists of threes, but they think in binaries. If you want people to understand an idea, set up a contrast or difference (binary), and if you want people to follow along or remember something, try presenting it in three parts.

Note: job talks are more intense and have slightly different requirements. The job talk is always a combination of big picture perspective on your work (breadth) and then a deep dive into a couple of examples (depth). If you put all the advice here in that context, these suggestions are applicable to job talks as well.

Questions/comments? Joshua.specht@monash.edu Or TWITTER.