Sample
Annotation
This
is an annotation for a book, however, you may model
your article annotations on what you see here. Note that the annotation informs
the reader about the book’s content, its argument, the author’s reason for writing
the book, and what “new” he has to say. In passing, it also gives a brief
assessment of the book and indicates the kinds of sources on which it is based.
Sample
Annotation
Bernstein,
Devoting
chapters to civil rights, economic policy, education, medicare,
and the Peace Corps, Bernstein provides a positive, perhaps even uncritical,
assessment of the Kennedy administration’s domestic policies. Acknowledging the White House’s failure to
shepherd most of its domestic agenda through Congress before the President’s
death, he emphasizes the political roadblocks Kennedy faced on Capitol Hill,
particularly an alliance of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats. Bernstein also points out that, contrary to
historians who have criticized the administration’s domestic record as a
“dismal failure,” much of JFK’s legislative program was on its way to passage
by 1963. Bernstein views Kennedy’s “New Frontier” as a progressive and
well-intentioned “update” of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He argues that the administration fought
valiantly and against great odds for the interests of African Americans, the
poor, and unemployed. In a final chapter he takes to task revisionist
historians for setting an ideal, and ultimately unrealistic, standard for
Kennedy to meet. In so doing, they have ignored the real successes the
administration achieved. The book, intended as a synthesis of the secondary
literature on the New Frontier, is based largely on secondary sources.