"The Playful Citizen" Book Review

The book's name is:

"The Playful Citizen"

Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture

A Book Review requests:

Length: 750-1000 words (~2.5-5 double spaced pages) PLEASE NOTE: this is NOT the same word count as mentioned in the Film Matters guidelines. Otherwise, must follow Film Matters style guidelines and MLA Handbook (8th edition).

Writing a book review gives you the opportunity carefully to read one book on film from cover to cover—something we rarely take time to do as individual researchers or when assigned reading for classes. Many of the books from which you may choose are fairly broad in scope, some are much narrower, some are edited volumes where the individual essays are much less tightly connected than individual chapters in a single author book.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PURCHASE THE BOOK YOU REVIEW: I have in my possession OR will soon have a number of review copies of books. If you review a book, the book is yours to keep. You may also choose another recent (1-3 years old) scholarly book to review—if you let me know the title, I will contact the publisher to order a review copy for you.

Your major task in this assignment is to think carefully about the author’s approach to film—what use they make of film, what questions they are asking, how film fits into the cultural, historical or theoretical project that they have set out to realize. (NB: These are the same kinds of questions we will be asking/discussing together as we look at individual articles!)

A good review will…

A) summarize the project’s scope (define its corpus of primary texts), nature (methods/approach), and argument.

NB: the author will probably have done this for you in the introduction, at least to some degree, but watch out—not all books do what they promise! You need to be able to make your own statements about what really happens in the book. In most cases, it will be appropriate to make some general statements about the project as a whole, and then briefly touch on each individual chapter. In summarizing: BE SUCCINCT. There is a thin line between giving your reader a full picture of the book’s topic/argument and getting sucked into unhelpful digression.

Caveat: If you have chosen an edited volume, you will obviously not quite be able to summarize an overarching argument per se, but rather you will need to present the logic of the editors in assembling the essays in their volume. From there (as with a single-author text) you will need to evaluate whether the essays do what the editors claim/aspire to, or not. It is typical for edited volumes to be somewhat uneven—some essays will be better, better written, more compelling, etc. than others, so there’s scarcely a need to mention this, let alone belabor it. One reviewing strategy is to mention every essay at least briefly. Another is to focus on a selection of essays and give them slightly longer treatment. Highlighting the best essays in a collection while saying nothing about bad ones is an appropriate tactic—you have so little room for comment anyway that it’s most important to be sure that attention is called to good work.

B) evaluate the project. (This really is secondary and less important than #1. You should expect to spend far more of your allotted space on #1.)

Your focus should be on the book’s strengths and on what it does accomplish—it is not useful to reproach an author for not having written a totally different book just because you would have rather read that other book! Comments on weaknesses should be extremely tactful. In reviewing for publication, it is OK to make observations about a project’s limitations, but you need to be very careful about doing so. Authors are human beings and professionals, they will read your words and they will be affected by them, both personally/emotionally and professionally—bad reviews can have very serious professional consequences, so they should not be published lightly. You may include some brief comment on target audience—some books have an appeal limited to researchers in certain disciplines, some could clearly work well as a textbook for a certain type of course, others will have a wider (even non-academic) public. Some are accessible enough to be assigned for undergraduate courses, some are written in a style that a non-scholarly audience might enjoy them. These are useful insights for your potential readers.

In evaluating the project, your job is not to criticize in the sense of saying “this was a bad book.” The books you will evaluate all have merit. The “worst” will still teach you something and the “best” will still have limitations. Remember that affinities and preferences for certain methodologies are as subjective as taste. You may not like a sociological approach to film. But, if the book demonstrates a well-executed sociological approach, then it is not a “bad” book, just because it is not more historical or more psychoanalytic. Or vice versa. As a reviewer, you want to give your audience a snapshot of what a book does—particularly what it does well—so that overburdened, overly-busy people can make a more informed decision about whether/when to read the book itself.

ABOUT CITATION:

It is possible, appropriate and often necessary to quote from a book that you are reviewing. As with all of your papers for this class, you should follow the MLA handbook and Film Matters guidelines. Please note, though, that in most cases, but particularly in terms of representing the book’s project and argument you should by trying to paraphrase rather than quote. When you restate in your own words, you are providing a slightly different representation of what the book does, and that outsider perspective can give useful insight to a potential reader.