Yale Book Review

[tourist]

Hi guys. So I have a question about this 2 page book review for Yale. I'm sure there's an older post about it, but I couldn't find it so instead I made a new one. Anyway, I have a review written already but it feels like I summarize too much of the book, and spend only 1 or 2 paragraphs at most answering the 'sweeping' question of how it's made the most impact on my writing. I have some experience writing book reviews (my thesis adviser used to ask me to review books I read) but I feel like this is slightly different. Any thoughts, suggestions, or ideas are welcome for those who have written it or are currently writing it. Thanks.

[JerryLandis]

I have yet to do mine, although I already know which book I will write about. I would say you should try looking at some book reviews on Jstor to get an idea of how to structure your comments. I think that the purpose of this part of the application is 1) to prevent people from applying who aren't actually that interested in the program by adding more work to the application and 2) to get an idea of what kinds of things people read and find interesting. Advice I am giving myself for this is to be honest, and pick a book that I genuinely find to be quite interesting a well-written. You may not get much response to this post though, since everyone writing a Yale book review is in competition with one another for those coveted spots!

[cremebrulee]

I am currently in the history department at Yale, and I have a few thoughts.

1) I think the faculty is fairly split on usefulness of this assignment. Some think it doesn't tell them anything not found elsewhere in the app, others like it.

2) Write about the book you most wish you had written (ie, one whose topic and methodology you enjoy/admire).

I don't remember the exact prompt. Are you just supposed to write a book review, or are you also supposed to discuss what your choice says about you as a historian?

Edited November 2, 2009 by historygrad

[tourist]

Thanks for the responses so far. It's a really vague prompt and makes the review seem slightly pointless. At any rate, here's the prompt word for word from the website "The department requires a short book review (maximum two pages) to accompany the application. It should cover the book that has most shaped the applicant's understanding of the kind of work he or she would like to do as a historian." I just think tacking on 'this book has most shaped my understanding of history and how i'd like to write it' seems tacky and forced. I mean, yeah, the book I reviewed was the best secondary source for my thesis and without it I would've been lost, but I guess I'm just struggling with my own inability to answer an ambiguous question. I just hope they wouldn't use this review as something by which to decide between two similar applicants. Maybe I'm thinking too far into this.

[JerryLandis]

I think you're supposed to use it as a way of showing how you engage with secondary source material, how you fit into and understand historiographical currents, basically a way to show that you have a critical but also enthusiastic eye for reading material. The only other way this tends to come across in an application is when you're sucking up about having read everything professor X has ever published and how it was amazing and yada yada, so I guess they're trying to get a better glimpse at how comfortable you are discussing reading material, something they would see from your participation in class discussions but not from other parts of your application. Whenever I have meetings or discussions with my professors at my undergrad institution, it normally launches off into a discussion about what so and so has recently published on a certain topic, and how someone disagrees with it, and such and such's article has brings up some better points, etc. It seems that being an academic/historian involves lots of talking about people's recent publications, both in informal conversation as well as in the form of published book reviews. So I guess they want to see how well an applicant engages in that discussion.