AMS 210/HUM 230: ITALIAN AMERICAN CULTURE - BOOK REVIEW ASSIGNMENTS
Object: These assignments are designed to introduce and cultivate critical reading and thinking skills, develop information literacy, and engage students in the academic writing process.
Assignments:
For these assignments, you will be required to write two critical book reviews. The books that you will review are Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato and Pascal D’Angelo Son of Italy by Pascal D’Angelo. Each review must be 3-5 typed, double-spaced pages. All citations, as well as the bibliography, must be in the Chicago style. These are CRITICAL book reviews, meaning that you will need to analyze each book carefully. Among the questions you should consider are:
Why did the author of the book choose to write on the Italian immigrant experience?
What is the author’s main goal in writing this book? Does the author state a purpose?
What are the main arguments of the book?
Would you characterize the book as sympathetic to the subject or critical?
Are you convinced by the arguments of the author?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the book?
Is the book well written?
What type of readers would find the book useful? (Students, General Readers, Experts in the field?)
These are just some of the questions to consider in your papers. The bottom line is that you are expected to engage the materials and ask why D’Angelo and di Donato wrote on the immigrant experience. All authors have an agenda. As part of the assignments, you are required to do research on each author to find out who they are. The more you know about the authors, the better you will be able to discern their purpose.
To help with the research for this paper, a library instruction session will be provided to the class on October 3rd.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is using the words or ideas of others without giving credit where credit is due. If you use the exact words of another person (no matter what the length), you must put those words in quotation marks and include a citation to indicate their source. If you use someone else's ideas or paraphrase someone's words, you must also cite that. You must also indicate the source of specific facts you use in a paper.
The Modern Language Association's MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers defines plagiarism as follows:
- repeating another's sentences as your own,
- adopting a particularly apt phrase as your own,
- paraphrasing someone else's argument as your own,
- presenting someone else's line of thinking in the development of a thesis as though it were your own.
In short, to plagiarize is to give the impression that you have written or thought something that you have in fact borrowed from another. Writers may use another person's words and thoughts but must acknowledge them.
The penalties for plagiarism may be severe, ranging from failure on the piece of work, to failure in the course, to expulsion from the college in extreme cases.
THE DUE DATES FOR THE BOOK REVIEWS ARE:
November 21, 2023 – Book Review Assignment # 1 – Pascal D’Angelo Son of Italy
December 12, 2023 – Book Review Assignment #2 – Christ in Concrete
