my girl friend is a history major at a nearby university. she has a 5 page book review due. she is brilliant and has done some remarkable term papers, but not a book review of that length. she says that she is only good for about 2 pages. to do one of that length she said that she needed an example of one as a template. i smugly referred her to the journal of american history…and then was non-plussed when i checked them out and found that they were consistently about 2 or 3 pages length at the max. so, is there an online (she has subscription privileges from the university) site that has any kind of book reviews that run that length (about 1200 words, mol)?
thanks
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The best plan would be to look at a database, so you can see a variety of articles from different journals. I’m sure she’ll eventually find one more than 5 pages, although usually journals don’t haev that much space. I also have to write book reviews this year, and what gives me a lot of material, although I don’t know if she’s allowed doing this, is referring to other academic book reviews on the book.
Anyway, ProQuest is my favourite database.
Note that one journal page can have considerably more words than an essay page. I just checked one of the book reviews on the current issue of Science; it’s apparently 2 print pages but it has 1376 words.
The thing to do is to write a 2-3 page essay on the field and then a similar amount on the book itself. See any issue of the NY Review of Books for examples. These are not academic reviews, but have much the same style.
As an aside, I think these assignments that specify a length are stupid. The length ought to be dictated by how much you have to say on a topic. When I assigned term papers (in a course on history of mathematics) I gave no length. When asked I said not over 5000 words. I got papers from maybe 1500 to one of 20,000 (the latter with apologies for its length, but the student had clearly got carried away with his topic). They wrote at whatever length they had–or thought they had–something to say.