The critical gift: Revaluing book reviews in Educational Philosophy and Theory

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Notes

1 While the scholarly book review might be ailing and in need of revitalisation, other subspecies of of the genre are thriving: witness the ever-increasing significance of the user book review on retail websites like Amazon, if only because they offer a quantitative proxy to evaluate the reception of books by the buying public (Roncevic, 2019).

2 However, which books are reviewed is a reliable indicator of which books will end up being cited (Gorraiz, Gumpenberger, & Purnell, 2014). Also, insofar as book reviews themselves get cited, those that refer to other books in the scholarly field get cited more often – in the Humanities, at least (Zuccala & van Leeuwen, 2011).

3 … and not in the discipline of philosophy …

4 For a telling analysis of the evolution of the rhetorical relationship between the reviewer as evaluator, the book and the author in the case of scholarly book reviews in English-language medical journals from 1890 to 2008, see Salager-Meyer, Alcaraz-Ariza, and Pabón (2010).

5 For a fascinating blow-by-blow account of an only sometimes scholarly stoush over the nature of book reviews in Pre/Text between rhetoric and composition scholars Stephen North and David Bartholomae after the latter reviewed the former’s book, see Mark Wiley’s “How to Read a Book: Reflections on the Ethics of Book Reviewing” (1993), which is by way of a response to North’s essay “On Book Reviews in Rhetoric and Composition” (1992). For a more recent example of how disciplines can talk past each other in book reviews, see the book review symposium on Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature in Sociology (Ray, Lea, & Bhatt, 2013) and his rejoinder (Pinker, 2015).

6 For the use of book reviews to teach students how to write for a scholarly audience, see Rowland, Knapp, and Fargo (2019, 2020).

7 For one of the few attempts to collect empirical data to compare disciplinary differences in book reviews, see Spink et al. (1998), which suggests that book reviews in the sciences tend to be descriptive and those in the humanities, more explicitly evaluative. East (2011) argues that they are given greater weight in the humanities (in the scholarly community and in research audits), due to the greater importance of monographs in the humanities, and that they tend to be longer, include more references and experiment more in their style.

8 For an entertaining dialogue on the virtues or otherwise of book reviewing (and editing book reviews), see Langlitz and Fitzgerald (2019).

9 For further practical advice, see Adams (2007) and Hartley (2008).

10 For a lovely (but somewhat tame) example of a reviewer refusing to review a book – John Schilb’s Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations – according to the conventional formula, see Fernheimer (2009).

11 For a suggestive introduction to how to actualise the concept of counter-actualisation (or, as it is otherwise known, “vice-diction”), see Sholtz (2016).

12 Although book review symposia or roundtables are sometimes cooperatively conceived (as they are frequently in Sociology, for example), they are not commonly collaboratively written. For a recent example of the latter, see Boston, Cohn, McKittrick, and Snead (2014).

13 I would note that we are limited at Educational Philosophy and Theory in our ability to embed video or other visual artefacts in reviews. However, for a journal that can accommodate reviews that rely on visual media, see the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy: https://brill.com/view/journals/vjep/vjep-overview.xml

14 For the transformation of book reviews due to their increasing publication online, see McGrath, Metz, and Rutledge (2005). For the use of multimedia/multimodal book reviews to teach students how to write for a scholarly audience online, see Tulley and Blair (2009).