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Book Reviews

JTW Book Review Policy
By Gail Stygall

". . . a viewless review is impossible."
-Steven Stowe. "Thinking about Reviews"
Journal of American History 78.2 (1991): 594

In his essay, "Thinking about Reviews," Steven Stowe, associate editor and reviews editor for the Journal of American History, discusses the curiosity that almost all reviews editors have about the impact of their journal's reviews. Are they useful to readers? Do they have something important to say about our bit of space in the academy? Given the large numbers of books published each year, can we afford to do review essays? Should we also provide large numbers of brief book notes? Stowe chose to answer the question by sending out a survey to his journal's subscribers. He received an 8% reply, only a little better than direct mail advertising, so it is difficult to know how to take his results. Of those who did respond, he found that the reviews were sometimes the only part of the journal that some subscribers read faithfully (593). He also found those who wanted deeper conversation about the importance of certain books and their challenges to current thinking. And he also found that reviewers who wrote in the specialized language of a subdiscipline were alienating groups of readers from work they may well have been applauding.

As the reviews editor of the Journal of Teaching Writing, I am well aware of the complex demands readers may make of a journal's reviews section. Recent changes in College Composition and Communication's reviews, including experimenting with various formats, demonstrate various possibilities, especially the shorter, brief notes about new work. Yet, from my own sense of the histories of various disciplines, I know that a review, even a review of a single book, placed into a larger context, can have lasting impact. In linguistics, for example, the sea change of the growing generativist movement, arrived at least in part with a book review, Noam Chomsky's 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language.

As Frederick Newmeyer describes it,

Chomsky first described generative grammar as a cognitive model in his 1959 review . . . Pointing to the complexity of language and the amazing speed with which it is acquired, Chomsky concluded that children could not possibly be born 'blank slates,' as Skinner and other behaviorists would have it Chomsky's review has come to be regarded as one of the foundational documents of thediscipline of cognitive psychology, and even after the passage of twenty-five (now thirty-five) years it is considered the most important refutation of behaviorism.(73)

In addition to the uncertainty reviews editors face with the tension between coverage (addressing the large numbers of new books published) and reflectiveness (thinking about how a handful of those books have considerable impact), there is the question of who reviews and under what circumstances. Some journals have large pools of reviewers; Stowe and JAH keep a file of thousands of reviewers. But even with that sort of file, it is likely to be a journal or reviews editor seeking out a reviewer of a particular trend or area of new research and reflection. Those decisions can sometimes result in a kind of insularity in reviewing that doesn't invite readers to sample the selection. Some even suggest that reviewing is a good way to position the review writer for getting started as an academic or achieving a better teaching job. Linda Simon's "The Pleasures of Book Reviewing," in Scholarly Publica1ion makes such an argument, and Robin Erwin, in "Reviewing Books for Scholarly Journals" comments, "[r]eviewing books is an excellent way to earn a publication credit or to develop professional relationships with authors and editors" (111). Moreover, the focus on new books, means that we rarely reflect on how some books continue to inform us a decade or more after their original publication. During my term as the reviews editor for the Journal of Teaching Writing, I hope to continue the tradition, started under John Trimbur's term, of commissioning at least one longer review essay. But in addition to that past practice, I will also be inviting brief reviews, in the 500 word range, both in recently published books, and as reflections from practicing teachers of writing on books that have stood the test of time. In order to accomplish that end, I have asked the staff at the Puget Sound Writing Project this summer to put their institute teachers to work reflecting on the most useful books in writing practice published in the last decade. I am in the process of inviting other National Writing Project Directors to participate. The first of these retrospective assessments will be in the next issue of JTW. Both of these projects make use of established pathways, but I am also interested in receiving proposals for reviews from readers who may not be in these same established pathways. If you believe that there is a book (or books) that have been overlooked, then propose a review. And finally, I want to move JTW to other media for teachers of writing. I would like to encourage readers to propose reviews on writing software for classrooms and reviews of electronic discussion groups as well. University faculty tend to stay well within the bounds of the Internet, while commercial providers often have lively forums for teachers.

Copyright JTW 1996

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