A book review is a sophisticated
combination of summary and evaluation. Listed below are tips on how
to write a basic review. For this exercise, I have excerpted my review a
literary text -- The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 – which
appeared in The St. James Guide to Young Adult Authors, 2nd ed.
Editors, Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast. Detroit: St. James
Press, 1999. 208-209 and my review of John Gruesser’s Black on Black,
which will appear in Modern Fiction Studies this winter. Keep in
mind that I was limited in terms of space in the Gruesser review to 650 words
and in the Curtis review to 700 words. For my class your review should be
3-4 pages in length, which translates into 1500-2000 words. This will
allow you to go into more depth as you discuss your author’s ideas. Keep
in mind that your reviews will need to be DOUBLE SPACED.
Step One:
Bibliographic Information
You
need to provide this information so that the reader can look up the book.
Author’s First Name/Author’s Last Name/Title of Book (in italics or
underlined)/Publisher/Year/Number of Pages.
Example:
Christopher Paul Curtis. The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963.
Delacorte, 1995. 256pp.
Step Two:
Introductory Section
In
the first section, you need to give the reader a brief summary of the author’s
main arguments or main points and enough background information so that your
reader will understand those arguments and/or points. (1-2 paragraphs)
When you are writing a review of a work of fiction, it is a good idea to tell
the reader what genre the author is working in. For instance, Curtis is
writing a young adult novel in the tradition of African American children’s
literature. The main points, according to the reviewer, are Curtis’
depiction of the impact that social and political events can have on children
AND Curtis’ portrayal of the inner life of an African-American family during
the Civil Rights Movement.
Example:
Christopher Paul Curtis’ award-winning first novel, The Watsons Got to
Birmingham – 1963, is a coming-of-age narrative set in the blue-collar town
of Flint, Michigan, during the Civil Rights Movement. The subject matter
is serious in nature and includes a description of the 1963 racially-motivated
Birmingham church bombing that claimed the lives of four young African-American
girls. By telling his tale through the eyes of Kenny Watson, a fourth
grader, Curtis illustrates the way that momentous social events and political
movements can impact the lives of even the youngest children. Moreover,
like Mildred Taylor before him, Curtis provides a detailed and poignant
description of the inner lifer of an African-American family, but he uses a
humorous style that is unique and geared to appeal to young adults as well as
to children.
Step Three:
Body of the Paper
For
this section, you should discuss the author’s arguments/main points in more
detail and provide brief quotes from the text to back up the author’s
ideas. This is also a place in which you can critique the author’s ideas
in a respectful manner. (3-5 paragraphs)
Example:
The Watson family, or “the Weird Watsons,” as they call themselves, live in one
of Flint’s segregated black neighborhoods. As a Flint native himself,
Curtis’ accurate descriptions of the living conditions in Flint, as well as his
use of actual business names and places, lend a realistic quality to the
text. This realism is carried over in Curtis’ depiction of childhood
experience as seen through the eyes of his narrator, Kenny Watson. Kenny
uses language that is typical of a ten year-old, and many of his cultural
references come from comic books and war movies. Moreover, the challenges
that Kenny faces are ones that many readers can identify with. For
instance, Kenny is teasedy the other children because he has a “lazy eye” and
because he is academically gifted – so gifted, in fact, that he is asked to
give recitations in front of the other students and is held up as an example of
racial pride. Although this acclaim pleases Kenny’s parents, it makes him
the least popular boy in school. The only thing that saves him from being
beaten up on a regular basis is the fact that his older brother Byron is in a
gang and is one of the most feared boys in school. As a result of the
constant teasing, Kenny suffers from low self-esteem and is willing to play
with boys who steal from him and hold him in contempt. Thus, when Rufus,
a Southern transfer student, arrives at the elemntary school, Kenny hopes that
the new boy’s poverty and thick accent will help to deflect attention away from
himself. However, Rufus is unwilling to change his character in order to
“fit in,” and he helps Kenny to understand the importance of maintaining
self-respect in the face of peer pressure.
Kenny’s other life lessons come from observing the actions of his far less
ambitious brother, thirteen year-old Byron “Daddy Cool” Watson. Even
though Byron is intelligent and is especially compassionate in his treatment of
the boys’ five year-old sister Joetta, he tests the patience of his parents by
flunking the fifth grade twice and hanging around with petty thieves.
Byron’s problems with authority come to form the primary focus of the story and
cause the Watsons to travel down to Birmingham so that the matriarch of the
family, Mrs. Watson’s mother, Grandma Sands, can “straighten him out.”
Based upon Mrs. Watson’s stories about her upbringing, the Watson children
imagine their grandmother to be a force of nature, akin to a tornado.
Indeed, Kenny equates the meeting between Byron and Grandma Sands to that of
Godzilla and King Kong. It is surprising, then, when the children reach
her house in suburban Birmingham and find out that their grandma is a
tiny, wrinkled, soft-spoken woman who gathers them up in an embrace and cries,
“My fambly, my beautiful fambly.” Rather than defy Grandma Sands, Byron
is awed by her presence and begins to reform his behavior. The maturation
process is extended when Byron saves Kenny from downing and witnesses the church
bombing that claims the lives of four of his sisters’ playmates. It is
this act of racial violence that confirms for Byron what his parents have been
telling him all along – that life will hold a number of challenges that he must
prepare himself to face.
Step Four:
Conclusion
In
the final paragraph, you should express your overall summation of the author’s
book. It is not necessary for you to 100% like or dislike an author’s
text; instead, you should try to discuss the author’s most important
contribution. (1-2 paragraphs)
Note: When you are writing about an author’s work, it is important to
attribute the ideas or concepts found in the book to that author. For
instance, in the example below, note how the writer of the review makes it
clear that the ideas presented are the author’s, not the reviewer’s. The
basic construction for this type of sentence = the author/verb … i.e., Curtis
treats.
Example:
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 is an insightful and compelling
first novel that has appeal for intermediate and young adult readers,
alike. The text also includes a brief historical description of the
events surrounding the church bombing, designed to contextualize the events of
the novel and to encourage young readers to learn more about the Civil Rights
Movement. Most importantly, Curtis treats his subject with respect, but
also reaffirms the value of humor and love in the face of tragedy.
Review of
Gruesser’s Black on Black
John Cullen Gruesser. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African
American Writing About Africa. Lexington, KY: The UP of Kentucky, 2000.
xiii + 205 pp.
In his earlier work, White on Black: Contemporary Literature About
Africa (1992), Gruesser identified as the primary convention of Africanist
writing by Anglo Americans the tendency to depict “Africans as lagging behind
Westerners in terms of moral, intellectual, and/or material development”
(16). In Black on Black, the companion volume to White on Black,
Gruesser considers the way that nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American
authors have reacted both to this dominant, myopic view of Africa and to the
concept of Ethiopianism, “the teleological and uniquely African American view
of history” that was inspired by the biblical verse “Princes shall come out of
Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God” (1).
Beginning with a discussion of evangelist Maria Stewart’s 1833 endorsement of a
cyclical view of history that positioned African Americans as a chosen people
destined to return Africa to former glory and concluding with Alice Walker’s
resounding rejection of this schema in her novel The Color Purple
(1982), Gruesser chronicles, in a detailed and convincing manner, the evolution
of black American literary responses to the consequences of the African Diaspora.
If any one prominent literary figure stands out in Gruesser’s study as an
embodiment of this evolution, it would be W.E.B. DuBois, whose early writings,
most notably the 1897 article “The Conservation of Races” reflected what
Gruesser terms “African American exceptionalism,” the belief that U.S. blacks,
by virtue of their schooling in Western politics and technology, were best
positioned to reclaim for Africa its legacy as an influential and sovereign
land. However, by 1936, with the fall of Ethiopia to the Italians, DuBois
asserted “the interconnectedness of black American and African American
freedom,” by denouncing even the most benevolent, Afro-centered colonialism, a
view that he would expand upon in 1961, when he admitted that while “American Negroes
of former generations had always calculated that when Africa was ready for
freedom, American Negroes would be ready to lead them…, the event was quite the
opposite. Indeed, it now seems that Africans may have to show American Negroes
the way to freedom” (14). Gruesser privileges DuBois’ decision to eschew
Ethiopianism, a philosophy that he feels placed a barrier between African
American artists and the contemporary Africa that they sought to depict.
Ultimately, Gruesser singles out Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic
of Liberia (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (1965) as the
most successful African-American representations of Africa, precisely because
their authors chose to incorporate “African methods to tell an African story”
(157). Gruesser argues that this type of generic hybridity is best suited
to “revise the dominant discourse” on Africa and to create a complex,
anti-colonial treatment of Africa (120). Thus, Tolson’s interweaving of
“modernist techniques most often associated with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland”
and African proverbs and parables adds a richness and a verisimilitude to
Tolson’s poetic record of Liberia’s tribal heritage, colonial struggles, and
post-colonial future. In a similar manner, Gruesser praises Les Blancs
because of Hansberry’s decision to rewrite, in dramatic form, Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness “making the falsehood at the heart of the missionary impulse on
the continent a central theme, and like Tolson before her,” using conventions
of African folklore and African music to tell a uniquely African story (157).
Gruesser’s detailed study, which also includes a thorough explication of the
works of lesser known African American writers such as John E. Bruce, Shirley
Graham, and George Schuyler, sets the stage for further scholarly work on
African American depictions of Africa. Gruesser devotes one chapter to
post-1950s authors, enabling him to touch only briefly upon the increasingly
complex manner in which African American, Afro Caribbean and African authors
have revisioned and remade our contemporary understanding of the African
continent. Nevertheless, Gruesser’s work is an important contribution to
our understanding of the cultural legacy of Ethiopianism, a philosophy that
continues to influence the theoretical and thematic content of African American
literature.
Gwen Athene Tarbox
Western Michigan University