Finding reviews of academic books?
score:5
Your question provides the basic response for books that are widely reviewed, however for books that are not widely reviewed:
Generally if a book hasn't been peer reviewed, that tells you all you need to know about the scholarly response to the work. Unless the book is in your sub-discipline and problem area it is discardable. Textbooks, for example, regularly go without review unless they're of importance.
Finding reviews in History, however, isn't simple. The journal oligopoly poorly indexes historical reviews, often merely indexing them as "Book Review" or "Book Review, XXX" covering all the reviews in that issue. The only certain way (given the poor quality of deep text searching in the oligopolists' archives) is by checking issues for two years after publication. Journal by journal.
Upvote:3
For academic books that have reviews (rather than reviews of any academic book) a good informal starting point is Danny Yee's book reviews. He is a perceptive autodidact who in over 20 years has built up an impressive corpus of approx. 1,200 book reviews on many subjects. I am e.g. inspired by what he shares on books covering China and Chinese history.
Upvote:5
- Do not underestimate amazon's user reviews. One must exercise caution and Quellenforschung there, of course, because some of the reviews are written by bigots and ignoramuses; others are written by good people who were perhaps looking for a different kind of book. Nevertheless, there is a lot of useful information there.
- For ancient and medieval subjects, Bryn Mawr has great academic reviews which a simple google scholar with the name of the book + Bryn Mawr review will usually bring up.
- Looking up citations in Google Scholar can sometimes help to evaluate a book as well.
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