#How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

##1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

##2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

##3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

##4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

##4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

##5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

##6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

One of these things that my professors tell us students to do while reading a work is to check the citations. If an author makes a claim that seems to be off, check the citations and the notes.

Example on how this works:

I'm currently taking a class on Ming dynasty society and culture, and we are assigned readings every single day. One of the articles we read is Shih-shan Henry Tsai's article "The Demand and Supply of Ming Eunuchs". There's a claim that Tsai makes in the article that's as follows:

In 1372, upon hearing of such a practice [of landlords requiring their tenants to castrate themselves before becoming household servants], Emperor Hongwu threatened to castrate those who castrated their servants.^20 But in spite of repeated stern warnings, well-to-do landlords continued to abuse, castrate, and even murder their tenants and hired laborers with little or no fear of being punished by the state.

The implication was that landlords were really fucking horrible people and that this was a common practice in the Ming. The poor tenants, right?

There's only one thing.

If you're a student of the late imperial proud, you would know that the Ming dynasty lasted from 1368 to 1644. 1372 is really early on in the Ming, like four years in.

So let's check the citation. 20 (the actual citation number) leads to this:

20. Ibid, 2, basic annals 2, Hongwu reign.

Ibid leads to this:

19. MS, 207, biographies 95, Yang Zuzhong

So this was in the Mingshi (history of the Ming dynasty, a primary source) in one instance. But as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that this continued to happen in later Ming.

In fact, my professor pointed this out to us during lecture when one of my peers asked her about it.

There's another story about why this is important that I'd like to tell, except that I think /u/Daeres would be better, since he was the one who did the whole citation check (although I recall it involving a citation for a book that never claimed what the author was claiming it said... WELP).

Anyways! Moral of the story is that if you see a claim that seems off to you, please check the author's citations!

Hope this isn't too off topic, but I want to say that this is the skill I've used the most from my history training (only a bachelor's and a few graduate school classes) in non-academic life, whether at my consulting job or in stock market investing.