A large part of the duty of journal editors is finding good book reviewers—something that is more difficult than it may seem. Too often book reviews are either disdained as lowly forms of publication or thought of as something that we do in between other projects. Nothing is further from the truth. Writing book reviews is both a service to the scholarly community and a form of public intellectualism. Persons in all stages of their careers need to make a serious commitment to reviewing books: graduate students as an entry into academic publishing and as a way of engaging materials useful for their dissertations; new professors as a way of establishing their professorial signature; and established professors as a way of linking older generations of scholarship with emerging ones. Such commitments are all the more important given the MLA's recent public support of reviewing.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
