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, Irving.  Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

 

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.