This really is an excellent new book. People with allergies and or asthma need to find different ways to combat their allergies, besides just using more and more drugs. This book is full of many fine tips for reducing allergies in your house, where you work and play. I am an allergy researcher myself, and I do not know the authors of this book but I applaud them for this fine effort. I recommend it for anyone who has allergies and also for the family of those with allergies. This book will be worth every penny of its cost, in savings and improved lifestyle through less allergy. Do check it out. Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening

I read this book over 10 years ago, and have not forgotten it. It is a wonderful evocation of day to day life in a small English village during "The Great War". Not a description of the war itself, but rather of the life of the village people during the war, and how they were impacted by the events of war, this book fleshes out the war as it was lived by non-combatants. I highly recommend it.

One is treated to a multidimensional, interdisciplinary expedition through British history that spans splendid Diamond Jubilee coronations and wrenching revolts, trade and exploration, pervasive hunger and far-flung empire, inventions and architecture. Within an English perspective, this book provides robust context for understanding the watershed events and significant social dynamics during the past 600 years. Superbly illustrated with engravings, paintings, and photographs, Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400-2000 begins at the end of the fourteenth century "when there were already signs of what has been called a 'new time consciousness'." Highly recommended for graduate-level sociology, British history, Western Civilization, comparative cultures, and philosophy of history courses. An excellent and timely addition to graduate school libraries and major public libraries. Robert S. Frey, M.A.; Editor, BRIDGES: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science

This is a fantastic historical atlas. I have a collection of dozens of historical atlases and the quality is not always high. Too often topical historical "atlases" have too few actual maps -- most of which are just reprinted from earlier historical atlases.

"The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History" is the exact opposite. There's an original full-color map on every page. The atlas covers the whole length of British history from the Ice Age to the Chunnel. The maps are very well made and detailed, alternating between overviews of the whole of the British Isles and close-ups of particular cities, regions, and topics. One particularly nice touch is original panoramic reconstructions of historic sites including: Roman-era London, Viking-era York, Medieval Norwich, Tudor-era London, 18th-century Dublin and Edinburgh, 19th-century Manchester, and contemporary London...

Trollope covers broad range of life in this wonderfully amusing tale of three very diverse clerks and the career paths they take in Victorian England. He depicts them with depth and sympathy and you can't help feeling sorry for the plights their own follies bring upon them. Trollope knew the life he wrote about from his own eventful and long remembered career as a postal worker! Romance and vivid scene painting combine with social comentary to make Three Clerks a classic worth reading for pleasure as well as for the cultural history education it offers.

If you want to know who's who of the 20th Century, this is the book for you. It has brief paragraphs outlining the lives of various persons who have made a great impact on our previous century. Although it appears to be slanted somewhat to Europeans, that could just be my American viewpoint. It is a great introduction for students of famous world figures. A recommended addition to any library.

A very nice introduction to the volume points out the intellectual confusions and tensions throughout. A crude marxism and psychologism overlies a fairly traditional stylistic chronology. One realizes how important are later studies that emphasize patronage and actual political power as opposed to disembodied "forces" and "spirits."

Hauser is always provocative and sometimes amusing. There are surprisingly few examples or paintings analyzed in any detail and sometimes he goes off in such detail on literature that one wonders where the focus of the book truly lies.

This book is worthwhile reading to understand the roots of modern art history - for Hauser is responding to 19th century writers and sees Impressionism as the great watershed in his discipline. He is thus aware of the importance of his own historical nexus, yet is caught up in a kind of analytical conformity that all too often seems like a grey flannel suit imposed upon the art in question.

kalinin@terra.com.br
When I purchased The Social History of Art I had never intended to read it from cover to cover. It is, in fact, a bulky book, which covers the history of art from pre-historic to contemporary times. I thought it would be one of those books you place on your bedside table and from time to time, have a look at it, and read bits and pieces when you are sleepless in the small hours. Surprisingly, I started reading it from the very beginning and couldn't stop till I reached the final sentence. I still cannot make out how a single author managed to cope with such an ambitious project.

Unlike other books of art, which stick to the description of each style, and some artists' works as something divorced from other events that took place at the time when they were produced, this book contextualises all the art productions according to the philosophical principles that underlie them, establishing the necessary link with the historical panorama and the social and political backdrop at the time that each artist lived and produced his/her works. Above all, Hauser's The Social History doesn't stick to the analysis of the visual arts as most art books do, but on the contrary, his broad scope extends to literature, drawing, paintings and even films. Never had I dreamed of understanding art as I could understand after reading Hauser's book.

Besides, as an amateur admirer of art, I was thrilled to realise that I could read and grasp his meaning with no extra effort; even so, he never patronises the reader. After reading this book, I realised that concepts I had always taken at face value and had never disputed, had gone down the drain. To my surprise, artists such as Shakespeare and Michelangelo are, in his book, not Renaissance artists but Mannerist artists. So, you learn to evaluate the artists and classify them using a different criterion. Well, this book is good value for money!

Well, that is almost the case. In this four volume set, Hauser accomplishes a concise but sweeping survey of art and society from the Neolithic Age through mid-twentieth century film and the dadaist movement. The references do require some basic familiarity with the literary, artistic, and musical titans, but not expertise. And a reader armed with such a basic familiarity quickly realizes that Hauser succeeds admirably in untangling the complex relationships between the political, social, and religious elements of a culture and artists of genius. After the initial publication of the series, Thomas Mann commented that Hauser provides deep insight into Shakespeare and Goethe. I would add that the same can be said of Dante, Giotto, Beethoven, and a host of others. These volumes may have fallen out of print or may be hard to find, but they are well worth the search.

This book reads much more like an editorial writen by a constituent of England than an objective description of the EU, which is reflected in the lack of documentation. It is written not only from a British perspective but also a British bias. While many trivial details are mentioned, almost nothing is said about what the treaties of Rome, Amsterdam, or Maastricht actually said and meant. Neither does the author use monetary values or statistics of economic growth. The United States is virtually ignored, although it is Europe's largest trading partner, and has played a key role in facilitating the EU's development. Maclay does mention the EU's apparent "success" in opposing Ronald Reagan's sanctions of the Soviet Union. Need Maclay be told that Reagan's sanctions worked? (the Soviets no longer exist) However, Maclay does describe key players, such as Delors and Monnet fairly interestingly. The diagrams are helpful (although there are only 2) and someone that knows nothing about the EU will undoubtedly learn something by reading this.

I don't know much about the European Union or its roots. This book gave a detailed, well-written, simple overview of the history of the EU. It gave me a foundation to build upon in reading other works about the European Union. This should be the first book someone reads before launching into more indepth and analytical works.

Hauser and Briggs' history traces the development of English culture from prehistoric times to the present. They draw insightful connections between trends and events, and supplement the written history with a wealth of illustrations that, rather than merely illuminating the text, form an integral part of the understanding of the way all things English have emerged into the present.

Briggs' history traces the development of English culture from prehistoric times to the present. He draws insightful connections between trends and events, and supplements his written history with a wealth of illustrations that, rather than merely illuminating the text, form an integral part of the understanding of the way all things English have emerged into the present.

I suspect that many people who come across this book will be art lovers, specifically admirers of Art Noveau and perhaps even recent visitors to the exhibition of this particular form of turn-of-the-century expression at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And this is, notwithstanding the prominence of the title story and Clive Wilmer's introduction, which focuses on the political aspects of Morris's writing, a book about the author's vision of beauty, of craftsmanship not for its own sake, but with the aim of producing work of skill and magnificence, and, as a secondary but vital consideration, the satisfaction of the artist. Morris comes across as a brilliant man, devoted to his many crafts (he taught himself thirteen) and passionate about human equality, though the impression from his writing is that the quality of the artist's skill, and particularly in the field of the decorative (what he calls the 'lesser') arts, matters more to him than the egalitarianism he trumpets. The political pieces, such as the title story, which comprises almost half the book and portrays Morris's vision of an ideal society in the year 2102, are the weakest, speculating as they do about a population of uniform mind in its espousal of the superiority of the Mediaeval ideal of art and its fanatical rejection of progress and technology. Genetics, the evolutionary territorial imperative, the diversity of human imagination which has since spawned the Information Age, are all swept aside by the juggernaut of Morris's Luddite, Gothic world-view (and although I accept the context in which he writes, namely late-Victorian London, I can't ignore his failure to mention the benefits of the industrialisation he despises, such as the increased life-expectancy, the majesty of the scientific leaps within his lifetime). Nonetheless, Morris is an inspiring polemicist: his rejection of the State, his fierce and uncompromising belief in his ideas, his utterly convincing support for the rightness of the individual's potential for common-sense and ability to recognise what is good, what is true, in the face of the pronouncements of authority, mark him as a defender of freedom quite apart from many of his orthodox Marxist contemporaries.