Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

This is among the most outstanding and useful books I have encountered on this subject. It is visually appealing (very important for artistic types) and incredibly informative. It covers hundreds of visual arts professions and gives practical advice on which courses to take in college that will give you the necessary background. The information is personalized through a case study format-interviews with people who currently have this job description. One of the biggest questions career seekers have, and one that is not usually addressed in career books is: Which school should I go to? It is not a question that is easily answered because different schools offer different programs. This book provides some of the answers; in the back is a comprehensive chart of schools all over the U.S. and Canada detailing which courses of study they offer within visual arts professions. I wish I had had this book when I was starting my career!

Although this compendium of horrors is a most useful tool for anyone interested in the image of the other in medieval thought, it provides little in the way of information on the hundreds of images reproduced. There is also a defensive spirit about the book, such as when the author states time and again that the Christian text is an "objective report" and the medieval appropriation of the text is depraved. The organization and choice of images almost begs the question of the author's motives. However, this book has been most valuable--especially alongside Ruth Mellinkoff's "Outcasts," which suffers from other problems. At the bottom of each caption, Schreckenberg lists some of the other places to look for more analysis, history, and description on each image.

The first surprise for the new buyer of Ron Miller's "Dream Machine: An Illustrated History of the Spaceship in Art, Science and Literature" is that it was published in 1993, leaving the book strangely out-of-date despite being exactly what the spaceship romantic has desired all these years. My library is chock-full of books and magazines on the subject of spacecraft, and I admit with shame to having discarded older books which would now be collectors items because the spaceships depicted in them were "out of date". Something Miller's book emphasizes is that there is no such thing as an idea that is out of date. "Dream Machines" (beautiful title) treats Defoe (1705), Jules Verne (1865) and H.G.Wells (1901) who dreamed of space travel with the same dignity as Tsiolovsky, Goodard and von Braun, who made it a reality. This book's 714 pages are packed with the brilliant, the outlandish, the amusing, the thought-provoking and the real - and the almost real - spaceships which have graced humanity's longing to go "out there". The fan of early science-fiction has a rich field to explore, no less the student of hard-core spaceflight technology. Of special interest are details of the spacecraft which almost made it - the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar, the European Space Agency Hermes spaceplane, the Russian Buran, and all the developmental designs which were considered, often discarded, with these never-to-fly spaceships. The impressive hard-cover book is well laid out, with bold-type dates and crisp drawings and a few color pages. There is some confusion about which drawing goes with which text due to minimal captions, but the generous white-space give the pages a friendly tone that allows the reader to go cover-to-cover (if one is so dedicated) or to leaf through looking for technological or impossible gems. The development and discards of the Apollo Moon project are well documented, and compared with the Soviet attempt to trump the United States in the Space Race to the Moon. The discussion of starship designs leans more to the "realistic" such as the British Interplanetary Society's "Daedalus", leaving Star Trek's "Enterprise" to get just a bit more than a mention. Many designers of spacecraft which never made the grade get their names into these pages. Author Miller has really delivered a work of love here. Strangely though, the reader's final emotion is one of sadness and loss. Here is all this brilliance, designing machines that could really take us off the Earth to however far we wish to go, yet few - very few - have become a reality, and usually by the power of short-sighted politics which beggar the vast vision of so many of those whose works are described in this book. If you dream of the Solar System and the stars, you need this one on your shelf.