Book Reviews - General Book Reviews
Your librarian for literature in English is Kristine Anderson. Contact her with any questions or requests. Your librarian for history is Lawrence Mykytiuk. Contact him with any questions or requests.
Scholarly journals are the birthplace and natural habitat of most reviews of scholarly books. Particular journals, especially e-journals, can be very handy for providing reviews. In order to find out which e-journals to search for the history of particular eras and regions, at www.lib.purdue.edu, click on Purdue Libraries' eJournal tab and key in some distinctive terms into the search box, such as: Georgia history. Because this search covers only e-journal titles, it cannot be very thorough.
In order to get more thorough coverage of which journals to search, you might try searching WorldCat. Below the rows of large search boxes, check the little box beside Serial Publications, then, above that, in the rows of search boxes, specifying the Subject field in the box at right, and, to the left of that, keying in broad historical terms, such as: Germany history war. Note: some journals do not include book reviews or used to do so but have discontinued them.
- Academic Search Premier and ProQuest Research Library, two of Purdue's subscription databases that cover the whole curriculum, have reviews from both popular and academic journals. Their coverage of scholarly journals can sometimes be much more thorough than one might expect.
- LexisNexis Academic has reviews from newspapers and popular magazines; "scholarly books may not appear unless they happen to have a local interest" (Kristine Anderson).
- Newspaper Source, 1994 to present offers some popular-interest reviews.
- New York Times Book Review database provides thorough coverage from 1985 through the current issue! (For earlier issues in paper from 1903 onward, with some gaps, see under Print Book Review Indexes below.)
Paper resources: general
- Book Review Digest, 1906-2008/2009, HSSE Periodicals, 050 B64
- Book Review Index, 1985-2009, HSSE Ref, 016.0281 B644
- New York Times Book Review, 1903 through July 2009, HSSE Periodicals, 051 N48, latest issues in HSSE Periodicals Reading Room (1st floor, far back).
- Times Literary Supplement, 1902 through Oct. 9, 2009, HSSE Periodicals, 052 L841, latest issues in HSSE Periodicals Reading Room.
If you are still looking for reviews of old books, in the Purdue Libraries catalog or in WorldCat, a subject search on: Books Reviews Periodicals brings up some surprising sources in microform, paper, and electronic sources. In WorldCat, you will want to limit at least by language (below the rows of search boxes) and possibly by date of publication. In the Purdue Libraries catalog, by clicking in a box at the upper left, you can arrange results in chronological or reverse chronological order.