Book Review Guidelines
You should review the chosen book and relate it to materials discussed in class. Your review should be typed, with standard margins, font faces, and sizes. It should be analytical and critical, rather than descriptive. You should include descriptions and discussions from the book in the course of advancing an argument or thesis of your own. Articulate your own perspectives on the ideas expressed in the book. You will be graded on your ability to organize and support your own opinions.
Questions to consider in writing the review:
What is the book author's argument?
Does the author present sufficient evidence to support his/her argument?
Based on your knowledge of the subject matter derived from readings
and other sources for this class, do you agree with the substance of
the author's argument?
In what ways do you think the author might have done things differently?
For examples of book reviews that can help you in writing your own, check out Reviews in American History and Journal of American History
Besides the books recommended below, you may also review a different history book, a novel (for example, The Grapes of Wrath), or a historical documentary (for example, The Fog of War). If you choose a work that's not on the list, please let me know in advance.
Formatting
At the beginning of your review you must enter the entire reference for the book, formatted as follows:
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (New York: Touchstone, 1988).
You should accompany each quote from the book or paraphrase of an argument with a parenthetical reference, including the author's last name and the page number:
(Branch, 45)
Grading
For a C your review must have:
1. Argument summary
2. An easily identifiable thesis statement
3. Full citation for the book at the start of your review
For a B your review must also have:
4. Discussion of historical evidence used by author
5. Discussion of the book's weak and strong points
For an A your review must also have:
6. Concrete examples/quotes from the book to support your criticism of it, with parenthetical references
7. Correct formatting of the book citation and parenthetical references, as shown above
Recommended Books
Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years (New York: Touchstone, 1988).
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).
Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977).
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995),
Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color : European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993).
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (New York: Random House, 1984).
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1991).
Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1988).
William M Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).