Book Review

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MPA5810bookreview.pdf

MPA 5810: Public Private Partnerships

Book Review Assignment

Using the Halvorsen (2017) book review as a model, you are to write an integrated book/article

review where you review, integrate, relate, and compare the three readings for this week. The

primary focus of your review should be Empowering the Public-Private Partnership: The Future

of America’s Local Government by Senator George Voinovich. You should relate this book to

Vogelsang-Coombs et al.’s article on PPPs in administrations of Mayors Voinovich and Jackson

and Ostrower’s article on the pitfalls of PPPs. Think about how the main argument or thesis for

each article relates to the Voinovich book. What are the main ideas, challenges, and/or lessons on

PPPs for local governments outlined in these respective readings? Your review should be four

(4) pages double-spaced.

Additional helpful hints:

The following tips are taken from Dr. Judy Millesen’s book review assignment in the MPA 6200

course.

Writing a Book Review

A quick search on Google revealed a number of useful “guides” providing information about

how to write a book review. In general, the advice offered clusters around five key themes:

1. Read the book, the whole thing, and think about what it says – good book reviews are

intellectual statements in their own right, take the time necessary to do them well

2. Organize your thoughts and carefully consider what you want to say

3. A book review describes not summarizes – it is a critical, subjective analysis of what the

author wrote (key themes, characters, examples, conclusions, recommendations, etc.)

4. Explore the issues and respond to the content – assess the book’s themes and arguments:

are they significant, clear or obscure, relevant or dated, overdrawn or realistic?

5. Place your review within a broader context, whether that is your personal or professional

experience, current events, or other literature in the field.

Below are the links to a few of these sites:

Purdue University: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/704/01/

Carleton College: http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/history/study/criticalbookreview/

St. Cloud University: http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/bookrev.html

University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/CriNonfiction.html

Concordia University: http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/bookreports.html

Your book review should take the form of other reviews written for an academic audience. It

should focus on what scholars and practitioners (particularly since public administration is an

applied field) can and cannot lean from the general themes developed in the book. Book reviews

regularly appear in many of the public administration journals (e.g., Public Administration

Review, The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory).”