Choose one of the six optional books (
Yong Chen Chinese San Francisco (Stanford: SUP, 2002)
Erika Lee At America’s Gates (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2003)
Mary Ting Yi Lui The Chinatown Trunk Mystery (Princeton: PUP, 2007)
Charles McClain In Search of Equality (Berkeley: UCP, 1996)
Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones (New York: HMH, 2010)
Judy Yung Unbound Feet (Berkeley: UCP, 1995)) and write a book review of between three and five pages. The review should do the following five things:
1. Provide a summary of the author’s main arguments (what did the author say?) This should be both complete and short. The summary will probably be most effective if it is integrated with the analysis.
2. Analyze and explicate the author’s arguments (how did the author say what they said?). This should be the largest portion of the review. You should explain the building blocks of the argument and how they fit together to create a greater whole. Look for themes, motifs, characters, or other things that recur throughout the book and explain their importance to the argument.
3. Evaluate the author’s claims particularly as they relate to the evidence used to substantiate each claim. Ideally, this will be built into the analysis portion of the review. For this task, you should answer the question of how the author can say what they said.
4. Situate the work historiographically by showing how the author’s argument relates to other books, articles, or conversations in Chinese American History, Asian American Studies, gender studies, race studies, or other academic fields. What authors did the author use? How did they use them (to critique, to expand, to revise, etc.)? How does the work relate to other articles and authors we’ve read in this class?
5. Suggest additional questions or paths that one might pursue based on the book. This should be a small portion of the review, probably no more than a paragraph. You can base these suggestions on the author’s method, ideas, topic, or anything in the book that stimulated your intellectual curiosity (yes, I am mandating that you say your
curiosity was stimulated. If it’s a lie, make it convincing.).
The review should be written for an academic audience (proper spelling, punctuation, citation, word choice) and use a standard 12-point font and standard margins. You can choose to double- or single-space the review based on how much you want to say
(seriously, good double-spaced reviews will get the same A that good single-space reviews get). Since you are talking about one book, you can simply use page numbers for the citation (whether you choose MLA, APA, or CMS) unless you bring in text or ideas from another work as well.
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