Book Reviews: A Specificity of Historical Practice.

The leading journals in the history of sport publish book reviews which are a longstanding and visible feature of the discipline. Indeed, some journals allocate almost as much space to reviews as to scholarly articles. In this article I analyze and evaluate the contributions that book reviews make to the production of knowledge and to building disciplinary and social cohesiveness in the field. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that book reviews play important roles in communities of professional scholars and the way that members position themselves and engage with, relate to, and judge one another. I illustrate this with a case study of 271 book reviews published in Sporting Traditions (the official journal of the Australian Society for Sports History) between 1984 and 1995. The case study yields two particularly relevant conclusions. First, the level of historiographical analysis presented in book reviews is typically minimal with rigorous, detailed and perceptive analyses uncommon. Second, most reviewers adopt mitigating strategies to temper or dilute their criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]