Dr. Kent
History 205
Spring 2023
Book Review Assignment Sheet for Looking Like the Enemy
ASSIGNMENT OVERVIEW
• For this assignment, you will be writing on a 3-5 page, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point font book review on ONE of the two (fascinating!) books which we’ll be reading over the course of the semester: Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s Looking Like the Enemy or John Lewis’s March. Your paper must be submitted in Microsoft Word format.
• You will be signing up for the book you’d prefer to work on by Sunday, January 22nd at 11:59 p.m., via the following Google Doc:
Please be sure to note down the deadline by which your paper will be due in your own personal calendar (you will all be working to different deadlines for this assignment, so Canvas will not provide you with a reminder about when your specific primary source paper will be due!)
• You will be writing on EITHER Gruenewald’s book (for Sunday, March 19th at 11:59 p.m.) or Lewis’s book (for Sunday, April 16th at 11:59 p.m.) If you do not remember which book you are writing on, please see the sign-up sheet, available on Canvas, Modules, “Course Assignments and Syllabus” tab!
• You will submit your book review through Canvas, via the “Assignments” section. Please let me know if you have any difficulties uploading your assignment through this portion of the site!
• You will have the OPTION of submitting a revised version of your paper to me, for a potentially revised grade, two weeks after you receive my comments back on your paper. Doing so is entirely optional, but you are more than welcome to do so if you wish! I will let you know what your optional revision deadline is, once you have received your assignment comments back from me on Canvas. If you choose to undertake them, you will upload your optional revisions to me via the same tab where you submitted the initial version of your paper via Canvas, the Assignments section.
• Quoting from your book in your review will be a vital part of the success of your review—providing specifics and evidence from the text will be invaluable to making your points about the book. When quoting from the book, you can use whatever format you are most comfortable with (Chicago, MLA, etc.—footnotes, parenthetical, etc.)—but please be consistent in your citation format. There is no need to provide me with a bibliography when quoting from one of our course texts (Gruenewald or Lewis), and I am not expecting you to do outside research for this review.
ASSIGNMENT DETAILS
In your paper, you will do the following:
• 1) Discuss what you feel the THREE MAIN POINTS of the book are. If you had to distill the overall message and content of the book into THREE main themes, ideas, or concepts, what would they be, and what does your author have to say about these points?
For example, say that I’d assigned you a memoir written by a Civil War veteran in 1877. (Which, alas, I did not. If only we had infinite time, to read an infinite number of books!) You might discuss how the primary points of this memoir were the memoirist’s justifications of the Union cause, his praise for Lincoln’s presidency, and his opinions on Reconstruction policies in the South.
Please note that I am not looking for any specific main points here. If you don’t mention the same three specific points as your classmate writing on the same book (or the same three specific points that I might come up with), that’s totally fine. The most important thing is that you discuss three things which you think are the most important in the text.
• 2) Reflect on the INTENDED AUDIENCE of your book is. Who does the author seem to speaking to, in their text? Who are they assuming and hoping will be reading their book? And how can we tell who this audience (or who these audiences, if there seems to be more than one) is? (I.e., is Gruenewald talking to readers familiar with Japanese-American internment, or those who are not? I.e., “I think Gruenewald is addressing herself in part to readers who were also alive during WWII, and also experienced internment and discrimination. She seems to be doing so as in the text she….”)
• 3) Assess what you felt the primary STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE TEXT WERE. Please note that this does not mean something in the “I hated this book”/“I loved this book.” Perfectly legitimate to hate or love the book, as the case may be, but you will go deeper than that in your analysis than a straightforward “This was great” or “This was awful.”
Your analysis will center on what about the book was the most effective, engaging, and useful—and/or the least useful, compelling, or valuable. Is the book organized well? Does it make the points it wants to make effectively? Does it succeed in accomplishing what the author hoped to accomplish (educating its readers about their experiences of internment and in the civil rights movement, etc.?)
So for example, your assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses might be something in the vein of: “One of the things which I felt was most useful about the book was Gruenewald’s discussion of how internment impacted women. By telling stories about how her mother’s experiences were different from her father’s, Gruenewald illuminates the gender-specific impacts of internment on women. For example…” or “One of the things I thought was the least effective of Lewis’s book was how he did not discuss what initially motivated him to join the civil rights movement. I wish he had said more connecting his childhood experiences to his later work in the civil rights movement. For example…”
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