A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review can be a primary source opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. Books can be reviewed for printed periodicals, magazines and newspapers, as school work, or for book web sites on the internet. A book review's length may vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay. Such a review may evaluate the book on the basis of personal taste. Reviewers may use the occasion of a book review for a display of learning or to promulgate their own ideas on the topic of a fiction or non-fiction work.
There are many special journals devoted to book reviews and they are indexed in special databases such as Book Review Index, www.sparknotes.com and Kirkus Reviews but many more book reviews can be found in newspaper databases and in scholarly databases such as Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and discipline-specific databases.
Famous quotes containing the words book and/or review:
“I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)