Book Reviews
A Book Review is simply a specialized kind of article that can appear in almost any magazine, journal, or newspaper—or online—and describes and evaluates a book. For this reason, most article databases in almost any subject area can be used to locate book reviews.
- Most book reviews appear within a year or two of the original publication date of the book being reviewed. In other words, if you want to find reviews of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960, it would be best to use sources that cover the early 1960s. Re-publication of important books are sometimes reviewed, also.
- To find a review of a book, search for its author and title in a database; many databases will have a way to limit results to Reviews, which can sometimes reduce the amount of non-relevant results.
- Book reviews can vary in length from a short paragraph to a lengthy essay.
- If you need to find a scholarly book review, limit your search results to scholarly journals. Also, many academic disciplines have publications solely dedicated to providing scholarly reviews, e.g., PsycCritiques or Religious Studies Review.
- Many books are never reviewed.
Book Review Publications
Indexes. Below are several publications, both online and print, which are solely dedicated to providing citations—not full text—for book reviews in many disciplines.
- Book Review Index (online)Covers 1965 to the present.
- Book Review Digest (print)Citations for and excerpts from review on all types of books, from 1905-2004. For easiest searching, start with the Author-Title Index for 1905-1974 and the Author-Title Index for 1975-1984. Volumes for 1905-1982 are in the Reference Collection on the 2nd floor of Alden; 1983-2004 may be requested via ALICE from the Library Annex.
- Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals, 1886-1974 (print)A 15-volume set, with emphasis on history and social sciences. Volumes 1-12 for Authors; 13-15 for Titles.
- An Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities (print)Annual volumes that cover 1960-1990.
- Reader's Guide Retrospective (online)An article database indexing hundreds of popular general-interest magazines and journals published in the United States from 1890 through 1982. Not limited to book reviews, but included here because of the large range of years it covers.
Major Book Review Publications. These will have full text of the reviews.
- New York Review of Books (online)In-depth discussion of current books and issues, from 1963 to the present.
- New York Times Book Review (online)A weekly supplement to the New York Times, covering both fiction and non-fiction books, which has existed in one form or another since 1896. The link above is for the website itself, which has only recent reviews. For access to earlier reviews, see the links on our Major US Newspapers page.
- TLS, the Times Literary Supplement (online and microfilm)From the Times of London; online coverage from 1994 to one month ago. The most recent issues are in print in the Current Periodicals area on the 4th floor of Alden. Earlier years (going back to 1902) are in microform; see the several ALICE records for exact locations.
Finding Book Reviews in the ALICE Catalog
Many records in the ALICE Catalog, especially for fairly recent books, will include images of the book jackets for those books; see example on the left.
Click on those images to find more information about the books, often including brief reviews; see example on the right. Clicking on the Reviews link will give you one or more generally brief, non-scholarly reviews of the book.