Midway through a recent coffee with a brilliant colleague, our conversation turned, as they so often do, to the various writing projects under which the surfaces of our desks were steadily disappearing. After admitting that she felt perpetually behind (who doesn’t?), she began to apologise for the tardiness of her book review submission, which I had invited her to author for Allegra a year earlier.
“I’ve read the book and I really liked it,” this colleague friend explained. “But you know how reviews are: they should offer a critique and I’m unsure what mine will be. I want to approach the book critically.” She was simultaneously reviewing another book, she told me, which she had also enjoyed, but whose author had just become part of her same research team. Their professional relationship had thus shifted from one of pleasant, if distant, collegiality, to one of active, intimate collaboration. How could she critically approach the book now that she was working so closely with its author? she wondered aloud.
Her comments resonated with doubts I, too, had wrestled with when reviewing books (and articles, for that matter) by authors who I knew personally, had interacted with in professional settings, or aspired to one day work with. I was myself in the midst of composing a review for a book by a more advanced scholar with whom I shared a field site and whose work I admired immensely. Although we didn’t know each other – yet – I viewed this author as a potential future collaborator, co-author, and confidante with whom to reflect on shared fieldwork experiences and conceptual puzzles. Ought these considerations to influence my approach to her book and, if so, in what way? Might they do so unwittingly, were I not to think them through explicitly?
The terrain between reviewer and article or manuscript author, after all, or presenter and moderator or discussant, is not so differently arranged than that between reviewed and reviewer: both are replete with hierarchies, inequalities, and personal considerations with relational and professional implications, some less self-evident than others.
En breve, as so often occurs in the life of an anthropologist, a casual coffee left me with a lot to chew on: namely, what is it, precisely, that makes for a stimulating review, and how might Allegra’s approach be said to differ from that of more traditional academic journals? While this post focuses on book reviews, it could also be read as a commentary on Allegra’s modus operandi more generally, including our commitment to and advancement of care review. The terrain between reviewer and article or manuscript author, after all, or presenter and moderator or discussant, is not so differently arranged than that between reviewed and reviewer: both are replete with hierarchies, inequalities, and personal considerations with relational and professional implications, some less self-evident than others.
In this piece, drawing upon my short tenure as Allegra’s book reviews editor, I share what, in my view, distinguishes our book reviews from some of those you may read elsewhere. I offer these reflections in an effort to prop open the door to Allegra’s proverbial printshop: stay a while, pour yourself a coffee, blacken your fingertips. My hope is that they will resonate as much with early career writers asking similar questions about how to kindly, constructively, and creatively levy their ‘critique’, as with seasoned scholars fatigued by the posturing, vapidity, and formality of the traditional review format.
Far from stamping one’s name publicly on a book in the form of a published review, an (dare I say, manly) act akin to marking one’s territory (or in this case, field), our favourite reviews are non-simultaneous conversations between author and reviewer.
Allegra’s book reviews differ from conventional reviews in spirit, approach, and telos. Far from stamping one’s name publicly on a book in the form of a published review, an (dare I say, manly) act akin to marking one’s territory (or in this case, field), our favourite reviews are non-simultaneous conversations between reviewed and reviewer. The richest engagements are empathetic exercises of intersubjective dialogue through which a reviewer endeavours to cross over an invisible threshold and think together with the book (author).
By insisting on thinking together over critiquing, I’m not suggesting that we suspend our critical gaze upon cracking open a book – not least if its author is a friend, colleague, and/or ally. Far from reading with disinterest or predetermining to like the book, what I’m advocating is that the reader suspend externally imposed (but, by now, internalised) expectations about what sort of review they are (supposed to, and thus going to, be) writing. Instead, turn over its cover with care and curiousity. Another human being put years of their life into the pages that you, in all likelihood, are now spilling coffee or wine on.
As we read and compose our first drafts, we would do well to recall some of the same principles passed down to us from our best supervisors and mentors: the author is not their writing; some texts never feel fully finished (and yet, at some point, pens must be laid to rest); what is published is not perfect, but the final iteration of many previous iterations which was finally released into the wild. In returning to our written work, there are so often aspects that we wish we could change, not to mention sentences that we wish we could rewrite, ethnographic vignettes we now see in a different light, and arguments we wish we could nuance, if not do away with entirely. Alas, published manuscripts, unlike this post and Allegra’s book reviews, cannot be amended or revised with the click of a mouse.
While anthropology continues to disappoint many of us in ways both real and devastating, hear me when I say: your book review is not your last stand.
A review that disproportionately emphasises ‘critique’ risks reading like a faultfinding expedition. Wade through the pages of any book with a foible detector and you are not likely to emerge empty-handed. In my experience, reproachful reviews tend to reveal more about the reviewer’s own disposition, their longstanding intellectual scruples with their field or discipline, or their personal beef with the book’s author or approach, than about the research that has been conducted, its presentation, or either author’s perspective on the social world. I recall Abraham Maslow’s now well-known ‘law of the instrument’: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But – surprise! – (most) folks don’t land on Allegra’s website to read about the chip on your shoulder.
While anthropology continues to disappoint many of us in ways both real and devastating, hear me when I say: your book review is not your last stand. The author of the book you are reviewing is not likely to solely bear the responsibility for the failings of migration studies to break out of methodological nationalism or to dismantle exclusionary borders. Neither does their self-situation in their physical field site, disclosure of their ostensible privilege, or sharing of missteps constitute an invitation to make them The Anthropologist on which to pin all historical wrongdoings. Get a hold of your pen, lest you lead this single author like a lamb to the slaughter, sacrificing her in a futile and self-righteous attempt to cleanse the rest of us for the sins of our Discipline (they are many).
Instead, why not consider how the book challenges you? At times, the reader encounters an accessibility barrier and, in my view, this is a point well tendered. See, for example, Nicolas Hilton’s review of Gideon Levy’s The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe (Verso, 2024), in which he notes that the volume’s curation of otherwise stellar, un-appended and previously published articles could make it challenging to follow for readers for whom even the post-2000s history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine is new. The volume’s assumption of a degree of familiarity with recent events invites the motivated reader to do additional learning beyond Levy’s own writing and, from Hilton’s review, succeeds in its encouragement.
While some review authors prefer to approach their reviews linearly, accompanying readers through a book from preface to conclusion, there is no single format with which reviews must conform. Paul Kohlbry deviates expertly from this standard in his engagement with Matan Kaminer’s Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture (Stanford University Press, 2024). Rather than summarise each chapter, Kohlbry focuses on what he personally gleaned from the book as a scholar of Palestine’s agrarian economy. The resulting review departs from his and Kaminer’s shared field, used here in its disciplinary, relational, and geographic meanings, and reads like an intimate conversation between allies in a global struggle that is reflected in and supersedes their respective writings.
We might draw upon our own research to situate the author’s work, support their conclusions, highlight what is unique about their approach, or propose new questions.
Reviewing a book whose subject is closely linked to our own or pursues a parallel line of enquiry can create exciting apertures. In these instances, reviews can be written relationally, to make connections and signal proximity. We might draw upon our own research to situate the author’s work, support their conclusions, highlight what is unique about their approach, or propose new questions. Andrea Maria Pelliconi does this deftly in her review of Adam Raz’s Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property (Verso, 2024), as does Alice Wilson in her engaging writing on Rusha Latif’s Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (AUC Press, 2022). As in Kohlbry’s review referenced above, the conversations sparked by these pieces extend implicit invitations to their readers, too, to think together with the authors beyond the texts at hand.
While the timeliness of each of these books is quickly plain to readers, Mona El-Ghobashy strikes a chord in her review of Didier Fassin’s How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (Verso, 2025) that reverberates well past its poetic conclusion. Far from treating the book as though it lived on a dusty shelf in the library of a distant universe, this riveting review leaves no doubt as to the book’s urgency and the significance of Fassin’s offering. In bringing such a devastating book to us in her own lyrical language, El-Ghobashy’s piece furnishes something of its own, too, the value of which is too often understated: an invitation out of grief’s isolating hollow. She is devastated and furious; we are devastated and furious. There is much to mourn together.
In closing, let’s remember that posing critical questions to think through pressing social problems together is why Allegra was created to begin with: to enliven the dead space between academia and public debate. Engagement in such a process is not limited to those collaborators with whom we comfortably agree — quite to the contrary. To borrow a metaphor from Gloria Anzaldúa, rather than shouting at each other from opposite banks, we would do better by wading into the river together. The point is not only to talk, write, or find easy agreement, but to build consensus by talking and writing together to collectively and collaboratively refine our visions of worlds more just and joyful.
In this way, thinking together holds the promise of new commons, not only intellectually but also (I hope) materially speaking. The way that we write, how we care-fully and thoughtfully engage with one another’s writing, is not adjacent to, but forms a crucial part of this labour.
Featured Image: Fragrant Native Species. Source: Sustainability Directory.
References
Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
