April, 2022 Research Update

Amici!  it is now May!

This update may be a bit shorter than usual, as I am writing it while returning from the annual meeting of the Society for Military History.  Alas, I don't have a paper or an abstract to share with you, as I am just acting as a panel chair, not as a presenter this year.  I do want to note that I hope to have the next vote of the ACOUP Senate either this week or next, so we have that to look forward to.

Aprils are always busy months as the Spring semester heads towards it conclusion.  Most of my focus this month, besides teaching, was on getting article II (accepted with revisions, as you may recall from last month) ready for final submission.  Academic journals, at least in my field, are unlike more public-facing media outlets in that they don't generally do much copy-editing or any kind of line-editing, so the job of getting the article into the correct format is up to the author.  Likewise, authors have to secure image permissions (at their own expense), which has been another adventure this month.

The particular adventure here has been getting image permissions for a Greek sword in the British Museum collection.  Heavily rusted, the sword clearly hasn't been a priority for a long time (I don't know that it has ever been displayed), and the museum had no high-resolution images they were willing to license, which meant paying for original photography and waiting nervously for that to happen.  Luckily, the photography got done just in time, which should clear the last hurdles for the article.

I also spoke with the editor of the volume with the Organization of the Roman military food supply chapter which those of you around for last summer may remember.  We are apparently hopeful that we may be able to get the book out sometime late next year.  I will, of course, keep you posted.

For a short musing, since I'll be working in May on a pair of book reviews I foolishly agreed to write, I might as well talk about the academic book review.  I could have sworn we'd already discussed the academic book review, but I look back at my previous updates and apparently not!  Well, no time like the present.

Academic book reviews are a pretty crucial service for the field, as even within a given subfield there is far too much being published at any given time for anyone to read all of it.  Reviews are thus meant to tell potential readers not merely 'is the book good' but 'what sort of book is this' and 'for whom is it intended.'  I should note here that a book review should not be confused with peer review: book reviews are essentially short essays on a published work intended for a scholarly or public audience, whereas peer reviewers submit private comments on a not-yet-published work being considered for publication.  Many academic journals have a book review section in each issue.

As a genre, at least in my fields, there is a standard form for the academic book review, which makes them generally both easy to write and easy to read.  The opening paragraph introduces the book, the author, the book's topic and where relevant the author's background.  Then two to three body paragraphs discuss the book's content and argument.  There are a few ways to do this depending on how the book itself is structured; proceeding by chapters, giving each chapter's basic argument and scope, is fairly common.  This can be tricky for large edited collections, however, since there each chapter is a self-contained work with its own author and argument.

This is also where the reviewer may discuss any shortcomings the work may have.  This is generally done, quite deliberately, in a fairly brief and flatly professional manner, to the point that non-academic readers can sometimes have trouble distinguishing a guardedly positive review from a negative one.  Ideally as Michael Taylor noted in a twitter thread on the topic, "you as the reviewer need only provide a gentle wind of criticism for it to collapse before the reader."

Finally, the last paragraph should discuss who the book is for and then the degree to which the book as it exists will serve that audience.  As I was taught, at least, the reviewer's job is to try to find the book's audience, whatever that may be.  So a book that makes no real new contribution but is decently readible can be recommended to a generalist or student audience, whereas a book that is very difficult but does say something new or interesting (even if it is not, perhaps, something correct or valuable) could be recommended to scholars in the relevant subfield - if for value in the debate if nothing else.  It ought to be relatively rare that a book is such a disaster that it cannot be recommended to anyone though it does happen.

As you may be able to tell, these sorts of reviews tend to be very brief; standard length is 750-800 words.  Public-facing review outlets (like a newspaper's review page) sometimes allow for longer reviews, but even these tend to be quite short.  As a result, they tend to be written in a pretty dry, word-sparing style in order to cram everything they need to do in as little space as possible.  Every so often some scholar - usually someone sufficiently senior that they need fear no repercussions - attempts to do something poetic or lyrical with a review and frankly I find this in bad form as reviews, in my view, are purely functional documents and should be written function-first.

And I think that is my general attitude towards writing a review: these documents are a service to other readers.  The reviewer is not there to settle personal grudges or peacock their feathers but merely to explain to a reader what a book aims to do, how well it accomplished that aim, and who might use it profitably.

In any event, that is how I approach them.