Book Review Assignment

For this assignment, you will need to write a five-page review of a recent science or science-related book.

The book will need to meet the criterior previously specified on the in class and on the class website and must be approved by the instructor.

Like other kinds of science writing we've considered, a science book review is written for either a general audience, a non-expert science audience, or an expert science audience.

The technical detail and space devoted to discussing (summarizing, defining, explaining, etc.) the science content of the book thus will vary depending on the kind audience.

For this assignment, assume that you are writing your review for a non-expert but very science-interested audience, the kind of reader who enjoys reading magazines like Discover and Natural History but who generally avoids the more technically intensive journals like Science, Nature, and The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology (for these, see IRIS).

Your reader will be interested in the scientific content of the book under review but will need some background, some context, and possibly quite a bit of defining and explaining.

You might need to go beyond the book under review, to other sources, to supply the most effective background, context, and explanation of the science.

Your review will need to follow, more or less, the typical book-review structure discussed in class.

There should be a few quotations to give a feeling for the book's style. They should be short with no more than one block quotation (more than three lines).