342 Spring '05

Book Review Comments
Friday, Apr. 15

I've looked over the book review rough drafts; very promising material. Here are some of my comments:

Openings

Again: It's best to begin either interactively or anecdotally (or in a way that combines the two). If beginning anecdotally, then take the anecdote from the book under review; from something the author has said or written elsewhere; or from something else you've read that seems to apply to the book under review.

Here is a strong example of an interactive opening (with some anecdotal force as well) from Ian Hacking's review of Colin McGinn's new book on mental images (published in The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005):

It is autumn. All around, the leaves are blown. Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red. We may disagree a bit, perhaps, about the hectic red. For you, that is a bit over the top. Why invoke a fevered hue when this splendid maple leaf is just plain bright red? Pick up a leaf of another color. You think that is from a poplar? It is the leaf of an aspen. And so on: we know how to talk about these things, if they interest us.
How different it is with mental images. . . . Some people say they can visualize the leaf we held in our hands this afternoon, right down to the small black spots, and the tiny hole eaten by an insect. Others say they cannot think of doing that. I visualize the face of an elderly fried, crippled with arthritis, but grimly hanging on. Or do I? With what detail?

Author(s)

A number of the rough drafts introduce the author by name but then fail to say anything else about her. This is not good. You need to give reader a sense of who this person is, what she's done, even why reading her work might be important: sort of a mini-interview profile.

Do a little Internet research on the author and include some of what you find early in your review.

If the author has written other books, mention a few of these by title (giving the years of their publication in parentheses after each title). Here is an example, this time from Hacking's review of Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (in the The New York Review of Books, June 24, 2004):

Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writ-ing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing. For decades, students of mind and brain concentrated on "cognition" – perceiving, recognizing, naming, classifying, speaking, generalizing, reasoning, solving problems – nd on various types of memory. Damasio pioneered the neurology of another aspect of our nature, the emotions. This is his third book in a sequence that presents recent discov-eries, his own hunches, and a phil-osophy of mind. First came Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994). Then The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999). Note the nouns: Body, Brain, Consciousness, Emotion, Feeling. And, in the new book, Joy and Sorrow.

Critical Summary

The main point of the summary – at least in a favorable book review – is to present as clearly as possible what makes this particular book interesting. In other words, what are one or two or three things that make this book absolutely worth reading.

Quoting

Remember to quote a few times from the book. Some of the rough drafts so far do not use any quotation. Avoid block quotes but definitely use a few shorter quotes. Refer to the checklist for some guidelines on where to quote, but, generally, quote in order to give your reader a sense of the feel – the style, pacing, particularity – of the book under review.

For the sake of this assignment, use MLA style for in-text citation (see the handout). That is, follow the quotation with the page number(s) in parentheses.

Addenda to Feature Story Assignment

A minimum of two visuals, at least one of which needs to be primarily informative rather than decorative (e.g., a chart, graph, table, or diagram).

Three typical kinds of feature story: (1) science focused; (2) story focused; and (3) opinion focused (or argumentative).

All three kinds of feature need to have science and story (character, complication) elements. Tthe third differs from the other two by expressing a particular viewpoint (e.g., colonizing Mars is waste of limit science funding; that science funding would be better used if devoted to researching terrestrial problems).

Whichever kind of feature you pursue, however, your main goal should be to teach your reader some science.

To do this, you'll need to work at defining key technical terms (as covered in Wednesday's class). This work of defining and explaining is handled very well in Pesce's feature story.

Notice how Pesce begins with a human/story element which she returns to in the final page of her article. Between these two scenes she teaches her reader all about hippotherapy: defining its key terms, narrating its history, describing its procedures and how they work, and explaining the medical conditions it treats.

Finally, remember that examples of successful feature stories from previous semesters can be found at The Rutgers Assayist.



	English 342 (Spring 2005) MW6 (4.30-5.50 pm) Hickman Hall 205 Instructor: Jonathan Bass Office: Loree 010 (W 6-7 pm) Description and Policies Grading Criteria Class Forum

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