H. Faye Christenberry, Angela Courtney, Liorah Golomb, and Melissa S. Van Vuuren. Literary Research and Postcolonial Literatures in English: Strategies and Sources. Literary Research: Strategies and Source, 11. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 262p. $60.00 (ISBN 9780810883833). LC 2012-009243.

Let me begin by removing any suspense. I found this to be a very useful book in both argument and format, clearly written, systematic in approach and scope, full of good ideas and good practices. An integral strength of this work lies in the ways in which it presents actual-hypothetical cases not simply in the abstract but step-by-step consonant with actual—or at least preferred—practice. Longitudinally, and complementing earlier volumes in this series, Literary Research focuses writing by citizens of the former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, beginning in 1947 (except South Africa from 1910) with the manumission of India and continuing to the present. Latitudinally, the full range of formats and content is addressed, with chapters on basics of online searching; general library reference sources; library catalogs; print and electronic bibliographies; scholarly journals; literary reviews; magazines and newspapers; microform and digital collections ; manuscripts and archives; and web resources. A well-formulated final chapter deals with " researching thorny issues, " and the work concludes with a lengthy appendix in the form of outreach that systematically addresses the major sources " in allied disciplines. " While not all scholars in these disciplines will agree with all the choices made here, they can serve as a useful point of departure. It is especially gratifying to find that significant attention has been devoted to ferreting out book reviews. It is little wonder that academics and others find writing reviews to be vex-atious—little intellectual credit is granted them and, once published, they tend to lapse into oblivion almost immediately. This is a particular pity; in theory, at least, effective approaches to a specific body of literature should begin with rounding up as many reviews as possible of that corpus for orientation and evaluation. Easily said, yet there can scarcely be any genre of literature more protean than the book review. Ideally, cadres in all disciplines should organize systematic ways to track reviews, but that has yet to occur. One might have expected that the advent of the World Wide Web would have made doing this both more routine and quicker, but not really so. Not even close. Using works by three postcolonial writers (Vikram Seth, Earl Lovelace, J.M. Coetzee), the authors go on to sketch (192–95) ways to overcome this deficiency, all of which are probably more labor-intensive at present than they ought or need to be, and hence all …