Piracy in the Ancient World Book Review
Piracy in the Ancient World Book Review
The book is: Piracy in the Ancient World by H.A. Omerod
There are many different types of book reviews and they have somewhat different purposes. They
appear in newspapers (Decatur Daily), popular magazines (Newsweek), scholarly journals (Journal of
American History, The Historian), and in specialized review publications (New York Review of Books,
Choice, or History: Reviews of New Books).
In this book review you will be reading a book of your choosing from the list below. Your book
review should look at this book in a critical way. Is the book convincing? Is the book an honest piece
of scholarship. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research or the argument? Your review should give your classmates a useful summary of the contents of the book and a historical judgment
as to the reliability of the book’s conclusions.
Most importantly and as mentioned in the introduction, you need to assess and evaluate how your
selected book relates to human expansion and globalization throughout history. Your review should
include what you think are the consequences of the invention and spread of the telegraphy for
communication between humans.
The guidelines listed below will help you to do that in your book review.
1.Supply a brief summary or overview of the book’s hypotheses and contents.
2.Assess the nature and the quality of the evidence presented.
3.Compare the work with similar titles.
4.Comment on the author’s presentation: organization, writing style, illustrations, tables,
bibliography, index.
5.Conclusion with final assessment and recommendation to readers.
Additional Details:
When reviewing a book, there are several other key words that can guide your efforts. Ask yourself,
what is the author’s purpose for writing this book? That question encompasses both point of view
and hypothesis. Ask yourself, what is the scope of the book? That question deals with what the book
is about. What is its subject (person, time period, place, etc.?
It is also important to know something about the author. The keyword for this is authority. What is
the author’s authority? Does the author have expertise or a reputation in the subject? Beginning
students will know little or nothing about the authors they are reading. That is why it is a good idea
to look them up and learn about them. All the people on your reading list are well known and
significant historians who are the subjects of entries in biographical reference works.
Beginning students do not know where a book fits into to the historical literature. One way to quickly
find out where it fits in is to locate book reviews written by other scholars. How do they evaluate the
book and why? Where do they say it fits? Their word is no necessarily gospel. Be sure you find good
scholarly reviews not simple library selection reviews, which are too short and lack detail for this
purpose.
Remember, when writing your review, you audience is your classmates and your professors publication, publisher, year of publication, pages.
•Put your name at the end of the review.
•Look at various reviews published in scholarly journals and see how they do it.
You completed my book review of the Victorian Internet, this should be similar, with a few
differences. I made 100 from a very difficult professor on the Victorian Internet. This book review
assignment follows very closely to the Victorian Internet review you are working on or have
completed. Thus, much of the information will look similar. However, there are subtle differences in
the instructions and structure of the assignment, so be sure to review all of the instructions and the
materials thoroughly.
In this book review you will be reading a book that you picked from the bibliography supplied for the
Human Expansion class located below. Your book review should follow the standard procedure for
writing a book review. Since you are able to choose a book in this assignment, be sure to assess and
evaluate how your book relates to human expansion and globalization throughout history. The books
on the bibliography vary widely in this focus. Some are about trade, others travel, some deal with war
and conflict, others look at how various plants and animals have impacted trade and globalization. In
this book review, you will be sharing what you read with your classmates so that everyone’s
knowledge of the topic will be expanded. Be sure to give them a good idea of what the book is
about, its reliability, and its usefulness. Your review should identify the book’s focus and include
what you think are the consequences of that topic for human expansion and globalization. The
guidelines listed below will help you to do that in your book review.
The audience for book reviews will vary by publication. Newspapers and popular magazines publish
book reviews to let their readers know about important or interesting new titles. They are aimed at a
popular audience and review works of fiction and nonfiction that is often not at all scholarly in its
intent. Some publications are a bit more highbrow than others. New Republic, New York Review of
Books, TLS [Times Literary Supplement, and New York Times Book Reviews tend to publish more
scholarly reviews as their readers are professional and other intellectuals. Of course, it is important to
keep in mind that reviews appearing in the New York Review of Books often spend more time talking
about the book reviewer’s ideas on the subject than those in the book. Other book reviews are written
to tell librarians about new books. These reviews generally are very short providing a brief (100200
words) description of the contents of the book and an evaluation. Finally there are scholarly reviews
of books. These appear in scholarly journals. Such reviews are 5001500 words in length. They
basically evaluate the books for other members of the profession. Book reviews written for this class
will follow the pattern of a scholarly review.
NOTE: A book review is not a summary of the contents of a book. Book reports summarize contents
and they belong in high school. A good book review is a commentary on the book. That means that
it analyses, evaluates, and judges the contents of the book.
