Book Review on Epidemics by Joshua Loomis
Brazos Gibson, The Southern Business Conspiracy and
the American Civil War: Why the War Never Actually
Happened. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.
In the first paragraph of your review, provide a descriiption of
the book’s thesis and the author’s approach to proving
- Every book has a point it is trying to prove–its thesis. State the
thesis of the book in your first paragraph, then describe the method
and approach taken by the author to build his or her case. The
organization of the material is one aspect of the author’s approach. If
the book is organized chronologically, for example, each chapter may
cover a decade. If the book is organized topically, one chapter may
discuss politics, another economics, another diplomacy, and so
forth. Whether the author wrote in first, second, or third person, or
even compiled a collection of works by other authors, is another
aspect that might be important. Here is an example of an opening
paragraph of a book review:
Professor Gibson, a historian at the University of Waxahachie,
makes the startling claim that the American Civil War never
really happened. Instead, he maintains, there was only a
secret conspiracy, rooted in the insatiable greed of Southern
businessmen, which duped a whole nation into believing it
had actually been to war. He approaches his study in a topical
manner, devoting the first of his ten chapters to a discussion of
theories offered by other historians in attempting to explain
the causes of the Civil War. In the following three chapters he
methodically refutes each of these commonly held beliefs. In
the final six chapters he builds his own case that the war had
no causes because there was no war.
