A plodding piece of literature in which the reader must wade through endless self-gratifying sentences in order to reach any material of artistic substance or value

Minor has undertaken the impossible. Any historiography that is limited to 200 pages will undoubtedly be overly reductive. However, this does not entirely discredit Minor's work. While one may take issue with him in a number of places (particularly his chapter on feminism) he provides a generally well-balanced, user-friendly introduction to theories of modern scholarship. Minor is very cognizant of his own fallibility. He recognizes that his sketches of modern methodologies are inadequate. But he provides the necessary background for anyone who wishes to understand the state of contemporary art history.
At the conclusion of this book the reader is left unsatisfied. Yet I think that this may have been Minor's intent (I realize I am being a terrible deconstructionist). His aim, rather, seems to be to ignite an interest in students of art history, that they might, of their own volition, continue their study of art historical methodologies. If this is indeed Minor's aim, he succeeds.

This is a great little summary of the discipline of Art History. It's a concise & well-written overview of the place of Art in Western History and Academica, from Ancient Greece to 20th Century America. You'll find it to be an easy but very informative read. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Western Art, Philosophy, and/or History.

It's a shame what passes for algebra textbooks these days. This is a prime example. First of all, most intermediate algebra texts (including this one) are filled with color photographs and fancy covers, all of which contribute to the exorbitant price tag, yet are totally irrelevant to the learning of mathematics. The authors should peruse some graduate level math books. Math is done (and always has been done) in black and white. Secondly, I find it amazing that they find it necessary to issue a new edition (this is the 5th ed. mind you) every couple of years or so. I wasn't aware that any new research was being done in elementary algebra. What the authors have done is write ONE textbook, and change a couple of equations, rearrange a few chapters, and voila! Now we have a Beginning Algebra textbook. Compare them sometime. They are virtually the same textbook. We use both books at our college. So the students pay the same [amount]twice for the SAME BOOK! Outrageous! But it gets better. Are you ready? The book(s) isn't particularly well thought out. For example, the authors (like many others) think that to add fractions (or simplify them) one needs to factor the numerator and denominator. That's well and good, provided all the numbers you work with have only 2 digits. I challenge the authors to simplify some fractions with 5-digit numerators and denominators sometime, with factoring as their only tool. Oh yes, they don't even bother to give significant information on HOW to factor: Namely, Sieve of Eratosthenes (to find primes) and use of the square root (to determine when the number is factored.) They wave their hands when it comes to finding the LCM, and the method of finding the GCD is delayed until factoring polynomials. Even then it's FACTORING once again - the most grossly inefficient way to find the GCD. Have they ever heard of the Euclidean algorithm? I assume they have SOME background in mathematics. Applications - part of the title. Let's look at some. Coin/stamp/integer problems are totally contrived. Even the poorest student understands that in the REAL world (the world of applications) one does not start out knowing that he has $4.58 in his piggy bank, and that he has three fewer pennies than five times his number of quarters, and wants to find out how many of each coin he has. No. Where does one realistically get such information? One doesn't. If you want to know how many of each coin, you COUNT THEM, as you must do if you know you have $4.58. The authors should climb down from the ivory tower, and TALK to some people that use mathematics (instead of just taking their photograph.) Then write some real applications. Another complaint: Using graphing to find the solution to a system of equations. Are you kidding me? What if the slopes of two lines disagree by 1/10000000. Graph away and say "parallel". The student (or anyone else) has no way of knowing a'priori that this situation won't arise. What about the degree of a polynomial? The authors mention it in passing, and then move on without discussing any APPLICATIONS (there's that word again) of the concept. You know, like when does one stop with a polynomial division problem? Or, how many solutions does a polynomial equation in one variable have?

I could go on (all day.) In short: forget this one. If you want to learn algebra, without getting a 2nd mortgage on your home, try Schaum's Outlines.

The material in the book is very easy to understand. The chapter test all come with answers in the back of the book so you can check your own work.

Regardless of the author's bias, the book is just dreadful. Of all the books on this subject, there must be one clearer than this. Just terrible.

This book supposedly examines different political ideologies, but all it does is slam on the right. Meanwhile, the left is somehow sacred, and avoids criticism. I wonder if the writers have been up in the ivory towers too long, because the real world is not reflected in the writing of this book! Unbalanced, and not worth reading.

After reviewing a number of textbooks on American ideologies, I found the Hoover textbook to be exceedingly fair in its presentation of all contemporary American ideologies. It approaches the topic historically and is quite accurate; I found no bias in favor of any particular ideology. It not only covers all the bases, the structure is sensible and very helpful for students, who think they know what "liberalism" and "conservatism" mean, when in fact they do not. It's not my dream textbook, but I highly recommend it.

This was the most irritatingly written novel I've ever read. Not being the type to easily give up on a book, I decided to give it 100 pages to see if it improved; I gave up on page 44, but before I did I scanned pages further along to make absolutley sure. Now, some would argue that I hadn't give the book enough time to develop, but to be frank, the writing was so bad, I had to stop for the sake of my sanity. I was going to put the book up for sale on Amazon.com, but there appears to be a glut of used copies of this book. I wonder how many others felt the way I did.

This book was terrible. I couldn't finish it. The dialoge was sophomoric. There wasnt any character development. A complete waste of time.

One can only hope the the Last Canyon is Mr. Vernon's last book. Flat characters; flat imagery; sophomoric dialogue; silly, forced, disconnected scenes: the genuis here is that one truly celebrates the end of Powell's journey becasue it also coincides with the end of Mr. Vernon's prose. One wishes Mr. Powell's journey had ended 300 hundred pages sooner.

Being an art history major and having read numerous books on 17th and 18th art, I found Minor's work to be one of the least helpful or accessible. He arranges his text by subjects instead of chronologically or by artist or by country. Though an interesting approach, it makes it difficult to follow the development of the arts through the centuries. Anyone really interested in Baroque art and culture should look instead to Julius Held and Donald Posner's classic text.

Here are my thoughts on this book.

Pros: 1. Very reasonably priced as a comprehensive review book and supposedly a money back guarantee.
2. It is current and up to date (as of the April 2003 exam)
3. It has a pretty good variety and quantity of examples and practice problems.

Cons: 1. There are a large number of errors in the example and practice problems. I found at least 50 errors in using this book as a review guide and it is difficult, especially on some of the example problems where I would wonder for half an hour where I went wrong. Some of the errors are obvious, others are difficult or near impossible to spot if you are trying to relearn this material and remember very little. I am sure there are significantly more errors since my review did not cover the book comprehensively and I'm sure I missed a lot as well.
2. The text is not very well written. Some sections go into too much detail while others simply scratch the surface. There were times when I learned more from reading the EIT handbook than from this review book.
3. Lastly, I was a little disappointed when I went to take the practice exam and I found several identical questions to the practice problems provided in the different chapters. The least they could have done was make sure not to reuse questions so that when we'd like to take the practice exam we haven't just seen the questions from review sections.

I have the restaurants and hotels book, a portfolio of 40 designers( which is recommend), and thought that this one would be good too. There are a few good photos in it but most are a little outdated and old. not a whole lot of creativity being shown.

I was originally excited for the update of this text. I was diappointed after such a long wait. The book is a good text for the basics of drug enforcement, but many of the focus areas are watered down. Where are the tactics and techniques for the street officer? In comparison to other high quality texts from CRC Press such as Geberth's Practical Homicide Investigation, Practical Drug Enforcement misses its mark.

Like the other review this is a book I used for a graduate class in ed counseling. I needed safety pins to keep my eyes open. This book is too broad and covers too much. If I ever wanted to go into career counseling I wont now cause its toooooooo boring after this book.

While there is an immensely broad array of career counseling topics covered in this book, it is extremely poorly written and is of little use. The author fails to define the key terms, and only vaguely discusses the key concepts. For example, Zunker fails to effectively explain Donald Super's career maturity factors e.g., Zunker full definition of Super's crystallization of traits is, "individual progress toward forming a self concept." In addition, Zunker writes in an extremely passive, wordy, vague style more tailored to impress academics than to be relevant for students.

I used this book for a graduate career counseling course. It didn't set career development in an economic history which would explain why theory developed the way it did. Additionally, the book doesn't explain many of the theories so the student can dilineate the differences between them. the author states that career counseling will soon integrate with other forms of counseling and yet, he doesn't point out obvious relationships between career theory and other psychological and developmental theories. There is a lot of guidence on counseling which covers both general and career skills. I would have liked the assessment section to be much bigger and more practical and the school assessment section to be much smaller. Zunker has an assessment book and should probably take his huge section on school counseling and make a book from that. All together the book was very dry and boring.

I hate to say this, but this book is a waste of paper and ink. It is poorly organized. It reads like somebody just copy and pasted paragraphs and sentences from a million and one source and never ever re-read the paragraph. The chapter headings and paragraph headings mean absolutely nothing. You will find yourself reading a sentence and wondering where is it going, then you will realize that you have no idea where it came from so you just give up and attempt the next section or next paragraph. But no matter how much you skip, you never ever come across anything worthwhile. If you have bought this book, fight hard to get your money back. I wonder if the editor that approved of this book still has a job? I have no idea how it made it to the sixth edition.

The rating of 1-star for this book is rather a compliment for this poorly written book by Heidi Vernon. The book is outlined in a confusing manner with chapter content unrelated to it's chapter titles. Terminologies and definitions are not clearly defined. In fact, there ARE no definitions in this book. Since this textbook is written mostly in an essay form, students to this subject are expected to already know any terms or jargon in this subject. There are grammatical errors and typos in this book. THIS IS THE SIXTH EDITION? How did it ever get this far?