People write and speak continually about the “crisis in scholarly publishing.” Yet the Internet provides new and exciting opportunities for the presentation and promotion of new books—and discussion of the ideas they contain. More than ever, important books are being written. Indeed, perhaps we are entering the “age of the author.” However, with so many books being published, how does one identify significant titles and go about making these books known to the world?

Library of Social Science Book Reviews identifies the best scholarly books and brings them to people’s attention through substantive review essays written by top scholars. The review essays that we publish will be thoughtful commentaries that engage an author’s arguments and articulate the implications of the book’s ideas, placing them in them in the wider context of contemporary thought.

Reviews are distributed by the Library of Social Science Newsletter, which reaches 53,556 subscribers around the world, including many of our most prominent scholars. Through our reviews, we aspire to overcome academic Balkanization, and to develop, as we used to say in the early (hopeful) days, a “community of scholars.”

Please click here to read review essays recently published by Library of Social Science Books Reviews and distributed through Library of Social Science Newsletter. These books were reviewed because we consider them “classics.”

We now move toward reviewing the best and most important books currently being written and published.

Selected Reviews

Kahn, Paul
Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty
University of Michigan Press

Stein, Ruth
For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism
Stanford University Press

Griffin, Roger
Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
Palgrave Macmillan

Marvin, C. & Ingle D.
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag
Cambridge University PRess

Skya, Walter
Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism
Duke University Press