Book Review Policy

I get quite a few requests for book reviews so I thought it might be a good idea to make my policy on book reviews available.  Generally I review only campaign, doctrinal, and unit histories, works on military and political theory, or Science Fiction books.  That is because these are mostly the only types of books I read.

That being said, I will entertain requests to review just about any kind of history book because insights into military operations or factors affecting military operations often have little or nothing to do with the mechanics of actually moving an army around on the field of battle and killing the enemy.  I agree with the New History to the point that societal factors play a large role in military history although I disagree about such factors level of decisiveness.

There are a few types of books I will not review.  These are any books with an explicit bias.  I have in the past had requests to review a few revisionist books.  I have also had requests to review racist or pseudo-marxist histories.  I refuse such requests as they are not history, they are propaganda.

I will consider requests to review types of fiction other than Science Fiction and do have a couple of other people that post reviews on the site.  I will forward review requests for those type of books to the other contributors and let them take up the correspondence with you.  Lastly, I will give preferential treatment for review consideration to my brother Veterans of the United States military services.

I don’t know how else to emphasize this but I will reject requests to review historical fiction out of hand.  I think I need to repeat this as I continually get requests for such books.  I have yet to read a historical fiction novel that I thought was worth the paper it was printed on.  That is not because these are not good books, but because I tend to get irritated when such authors fudge facts as they have to in order to make their stories work.

Lastly, since I am a truth in advertising guy.  I always preface reviews of books I get from authors and publishers with a disclaimer that I got the book for free from the publisher/author and was not paid for the review.

After all that intimidating stuff if you still want to request that I review one or more books don’t hesitate to email me at info@military-history.us.  I try to respond to every book review request within 1-2 days but it can take as long as a week if I am really busy.

To make things easier for all of us please submit review requests using the below form.

[contact-form-7 id=”5621″ title=”Book Review Request”]

Page Last Updated: 27 Dec 2015