1. It tells a diverse readership what a book is about—its major claims, how it is situated in previous scholarly discourses, and how it goes about making those claims.
2. Moreover, it displays a kind of thoughtfulness that the ordinary (harried) reader is likely not to get from a casual reading of the book.
3. In doing both of these things, it displays the reviewer’s critical acumen and authoritative voice.
This is all easier to say than to do. Any cursory glance at book reviews in major journals will show them to be formulaic or vague. So as you learn to write in this very specific genre, keep these things in mind:
1. Your first job is to absolutely nail the author’s main argument—lay it out as clearly as possible, preferably early on (in the first or second paragraph), without littering that information with too many minute details. Readers will also want to know the sorts of materials, evidence, and methodology used in the book. Be extremely careful and fair-minded when laying out this information, no matter how much you may be skeptical of it.
2. Include samples of the author’s own language to do the book justice. It’s your job to give the reader a sense of the book, of its major characters and milieu, as much as it is to nail the argument.
3. Address the author’s argument on its own terms. The fact that you don’t like Marxism is not a good reason to slam a Marxist approach. Seek out and try to understand the internal logic of every argument you encounter.
4. Balance the need to be fair and moderate with the expectation that you will point out the book’s weaknesses. No book is perfect, of course; readers often turn to book reviews with the hope that a reviewer has articulated a problem they vaguely sense about a book. Feel free to call it out if you feel a book has made an error of fact, uses what you feel is an inappropriately familiar style, or has a singularly poor index. But above all, don’t be petty in your complaints. Academe is a small world, and you do not want to offend colleagues who are likely to judge your work over the coming years.
5. Finally, the dismount: typically, reviews end with a cliché along the lines of, “This book is a welcome addition to the field”—boring, over-used, but the sentiment is a useful one. Is this a book appropriate for undergrads or graduate classes? Is it an important intervention in a specific and timely debate? Does it use a methodology that others can utilize? Is it a useful addition to graduate student comprehensive reading lists? Think creatively about how to exit gracefully without engaging in cliché.