Book Reviews

Book Reviews!

Your book review doesn’t need to be long, but it should include the following:

· A sense of what the book is about in terms of topic or plot

· Something about the writing style of the book

· Why you personally liked or disliked the book

o You can also mention issues/questions the book raised for you

· Who you think would be a potential audience for the book

Samples:

This sample is short but it works. You don’t need to write more than this:

Van Gogh Only Sold One Painting In His Life, Did You Know That?

5.0 out of 5 stars

A Wild, Funny, Surprisingly Touching Ride Through the Art World by Stan Washburn

My taste often runs to the potboiler, preferably involving a detective and a vicious crime. (Stan Washburn has a couple of those that are dynamite, actually.) I was startled to find myself swept into the world of this novel in a similar way. Washburn combines satire (well, the satire was pretty vicious, actually) with several rapidly unfolding, gracefully intertwined plots, and he has crafted a kind of theme-park ride of a novel, with buffoonish caricatures appearing alongside richly textured characters who struggle to survive the shark school that is the art world (who knew?). I found it to be a page-turner, and it made great company in the evening on a recent visit to New York, with days spent in galleries and museums that I now regard with a distinctly different perspective. (132 words) By Dan Quinn on June 22, 2015

If you have extra time, you can write something a little longer, like this:

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing "a rogue military commander" in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.