Review essays must address books or scholarly works relevant to the Strategy

Review essays must address books or scholarly works relevant to the Strategy | course material;
serious works of military history and strategic studies are appropriate. if you have any doubts,
check with me first!

A review essay should address the following four questions:

1. Who is the author, and what are his or her qualifications or relevant background?

2. What is the book or article about (e.9. themes, audience, theoretical context)?

3. What is the book or article’s structure, to include academic apparatus (e.g. footnotes,
bibliography, index, etc.) and how effective is that structure for the purposes of the book?

4, What is your evaluation of the book or article (e.g. strengths, weaknesses,

inconsistencies, depth of research, etc.)?

‘The essay need not follow this order in lockstep, nor should it seek a mechanical perfection in
addressing these questions, but address them it must

‘You may well need to probe a bit to find out about authors’ background: in the age of the
Internet this should pose little difficulty

All books, including novels, have a structure, that is, a skeleton that may or may not correspond
to the number of chapters. ifit recounts history, it defines a period and then breaks it down: if it
makes an argument it does so by analyzing a problem in its component parts; if it tells a fictional
tale it again makes some internal divisions, usually of time. Understanding structure is a more
subtle task than you may think, particularly as you evaluate (in the case of a scholarly book) the
quality of the apparatus of footnotes, which should tell you a great deal about what the author has,
looked at.