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?
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).”