Art History Textbooks ReviewsArt History Textbooks Reviews

Teachers, Homeschoolers, ESE Teachers this is a must have if you teach Eng/Lit or reading. Everything you need and for an added bonus purchase the movie. Everything you need for teaching literature or reading is here. Background knowledge, above and beyond engaging activities and discussion materials. The Blackline Masters and extended activities including vocabulary, questions, assessments, writing exercises, literature/story elements and answer keys. Quality lessons for Eng/Reading classes both MS and HS. I used this with High Maintenance students (IEH) which included a mixture of low/high reading/writing levels not to mention emotional disorders. The students enjoyed this and we watched the movie. The students and I had fun naming the know actors:Tom Cruise,Patrick Swayze,Diane Lane,Rob Lowe,Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio (Karate Kid), Emilio Estevez and S.E. Hinton(I didn't know this)played in this movie. Students were amazed of this books timeframe, the authors story and the relevance of this story in spite of it's era. Educators don't pass this up. Use it the first semester or end of the year and experience success!

Geoff Nicholson's exceptionally well-written book is a fascinating compilation of every aspect of walking. He enthralled me with tales of literary, eccentric, competitive, political, moon, inventor, artistic and recreational walkers...detailing many of their remarkable feats. His walking experiences and unusual people/things he's seen were delightfully described. I was intrigued by interesting walking tours, expeditions, journeys, songs with "walk" and walking scenes in movies. Mr. Nicholson astounded and entertained me with his impressive knowledge of walking! Amusing stories and trivia provided many laugh-out-loud moments. I really, truly loved this book because it greatly enhanced my cognizance of walking. Many of Mr. Nicholson's insightful comments gave me alot to think about. My favorite is...simply going for a walk is an invitation to a surprize! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS READ!!

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History of the Spaceship in Art, Science and Literature" is that it was published in 1993, leaving the book strangely out-of-date despite being exactly what the spaceship romantic has desired all these years.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.