A book review is good for at least three things:

1. It alerts you to a book you did not know about previously.
2. It helps you decide whether or not you actually want to read a particular book.
3. It allows you to understand a book better.

In keeping with the third item, I am going to begin posting my old book reviews in a separate blog arranged by both the date created and searchable by category. I literally have dozens from the various book reviews I've done in classes over the years. The blogging module in RapidWeaver seems to be the perfect medium for making these available as I will post them under the original date they were written, but at the same time categorize them under a number of general headings.

A couple of weeks ago, a student in a class I was grading for at SBTS asked me what I thought was the best way to go about writing a book review. I told him what I was told by Ronald Deering over a decade ago--read other book reviews first. Reading a book review before beginning a new book--especially a more challenging book--is a good way to begin grasping content before you even read it. With that in mind, I'll let Google do its thing and hopefully some of these reviews will appear in various web searches when students, or anyone for that matter, looks for information on a book they need for a class or just for personal reading.

With each of these reviews that I post, I will include the name of the class for which they were originally written. I may at times, choose to cross-post a review written here for my main blog to the book review section as well.

At this time, I am not electing to include comments with these entries--it's not a normal blog after all, but if you feel a need to voice your thoughts about a particular review, please email me at rmansfield@mac.com.

The book reviews can be found as a submenu of Our Library (see link to the top left) or you can simply click here.

Initial reviews posted:
Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Dockery, David S., and David P Gushee. The Future of Christian Higher Education. Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1999.
Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Unbelief. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Noth, Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1972.
Whybray, R. N. The Making of the Pentateuch : A Methodological Study. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1994.