History 4464/5464: American Sports History

Review Guidelines: The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

Spring 2012

Due Date: January 31

Length: Undergraduate: 3-4 pages

Margins: One inch     Font: 10-12 point    Spacing: Double-spaced.  (Spaces between paragraphs don’t count toward paper length.)

Book reviews, when well done, are valuable scholarly resources.  No one has time to read every book that is published, even in one relatively narrow field, and reviews help summarize in easy-to-digest form important findings and trends in the field as well as helping readers decide which books they should read themselves and which it might be better to avoid.

Writing a book review is also a good scholarly exercise.  It is a challenge to take a full book and to condense its story/argument into the relatively cramped space of a book review (scholarly journals usually set word limits for their reviews of 500-1,000 words).   The reviewer is also responsible for carefully evaluating the book and pointing out its most important strengths and weaknesses.

I would like you to write a scholarly book review of The Manly Art. Your review should contain several sections, as outlined below.  The sections do not need to be labeled in the paper.

I. Introduction: This can be brief.  Simply introduce the book – give the title, the author, and the year of publication, and indicate in general the topic and the time period that the book covers.

II. Summary: Trace for the reader the story that the book tells and the overall argument that the author makes.  This will likely be the longest section of your paper.   SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1The challenge here is to take a 250-page book and condense it into a page and a half or two pages, while covering all of the important points of the story and argument. This section will also demonstrate to me whether or not you have read and understood the entire book.

III. Strengths: In this section, you begin to evaluate the book.  What are the book’s strong points?  For example, is the book written in a clear and engaging manner?  Does the author seem to have thoroughly researched the book?  Most important, are the author’s arguments convincing and supported by the evidence?

IV. Weaknesses: Does the book have weaknesses?  Is it unconvincing, or less convincing in some spots than others?  Could the author have made choices as a researcher or as a writer that would have improved the book?  Is anything missing in the book that would have made it stronger?

V. Conclusion: Here provide your overall assessment of the book.  How good (or bad) is it?  What types of readers should find it useful? 

There is no need to consult any other source for this book review.  I want to see what you get out of the book and how you evaluate it.  I will expect your paper to be clearly and grammatically written with a minimum of typos.   If you quote from the book, cite the page number in the following way:

“Franklin Roosevelt had a black Scottie named Fala”(35).