This episode dispenses some straightforward advice about the use of quotes in reviews. Robert Cassanello speaks with H-Net copyeditors Charlotte Weber and Basia Nowak about some dos and don'ts of using quotations in reviews.

This is the first of a two-part episode about professionalism in academic book reviewing. In this episode, Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky look at H-Net's guidelines for professionalism and speak with H-Net copyeditors Basia Nowak and Charlotte Weber about two reviews that constructively critique the books under review.

This episode, which we are calling The Living Review, takes as its point of departure the idea of looking back to a review after some years or decades. Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky discuss an interview Robert did with James Struthers, professor of Canadian Studies at Trent University in Ontario. Prof. Struthers looks back at a review he wrote in 1994 for the now defunct H-State list. He speaks about the early days of reviewing on H-Net, comparative history, and the historiographical fate of the book he reviewed.

In this episode, Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky talk about what special considerations reviewers should make regarding a book's author. Robert shares his experiences of having his own book reviewed, and then speaks with Brendan C. Lindsay, whose book "Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1848-1873" was recently reviewed on H-AmIndian, about the ways that that review has been helpful to him.

In this episode, Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky talk about the internal peer review process that journals and academic book publishers undergo prior to publication. We speak about the expectations for peer reviewers in evaluating a manuscript and the work that publishers and editors do in recruiting such peer reviewers. In the second part of the episode, Robert interviews Derek Krissoff, Director of West Virginia University Press about the review process from a publisher's point of view.

In this episode, Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky speak with Prof. Paolo Giordano, the Neil E. Euliano Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at the University of Central Florida about reviewing translated works.

We start out the new year with a long interview with H-Socialisms review editor Dr. Gary Roth and reviewer Dr. Robert Barsky about Bob's review of The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jaime Nace Cohen-Cole. When Bob was working on his review last spring, he found that the "open mind" program that Cohen-Cole describes in his book, a program that "promoted to address the threat posed by Communism and ... the rise of social conformity, homogeneity, and mass consumption in America," had a lot of resonance with Barsky's own research on Zionist student organizers between the World Wars, as well as his role as a faculty head of house at Vanderbilt University. Bob ended up writing a long review that considers the issues in Cohen-Cole's book in the context of larger debates about education and politics in mid-twentieth-century America and again today. We discussed some of these questions, and the role of H-Net as a platform for promoting some of the same "open" values online, in the interview.

This episode is one of an occasional series where Yelena and Robert speak with H-Net's copyeditors Charlotte Weber and Basia Nowak about the nuts and bolts of reviewing at H-Net. In this installment, we discuss the use of citations in scholarly book reviews, which Charlotte and Basia explain are usually kept to a minimum. One exception to this rule is a historiographical review essay, such as the one mentioned during the conversation.

This episode is a special treat, as it features Robert Cassanello's conversation with Barry Mauer, Associate Professor in the Department of English at UCF and a former music critic, speaking about music criticism as a form of reviewing. The topic of the conversation turns to Bob Dylan's 1970 album Self-Portrait, which was famously panned by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. And finally, Robert and Barry talk about "meta-criticism."

In this episode, Robert Cassanello and Yelena Kalinsky talk about the academic treatment of comics and comic books, from art history to comic book studies, and Robert interviews Dr. Julian C. Chambliss, Associate Professor of History at Rollins College, about reviewing comics for scholarly and popular audiences.