The collaborative editorial effort of David Travis, Elizabeth Siegel, Keith F. Davis, Taken By Design: Photographs From The Institute Of Design, 1937-1971 is the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition catalog which was a jointly published project with the University of Chicago Press. Showcasing the photography that arose out of The Institute of Design during some three and a half decades, Taken By Design chronicles and documents a fascinating sidebar in the history of American photography. Enhanced with essays, articles, biographical sketches, course curricula, and more, Taken By Design is a welcome, original, and highly recommended contribution to personal, professional, and academic Photography historical reference and resource collections and reading lists.

Much more than a catalog

This book is not just a catalog of the show now at San Francisco's MOMA. It is a rich source that chronicles the evolution of the Chicago Institute of Design (ID) and its photography program. With 6 written essays and articles, biographies, course curricula, and other background it places the ID's photographers rightfully in the middle of the late twentieth century art revolution.

The writing is authoritative, revealing and thought provoking. Some is understandably enthusiastic, by authors named Moholy-Nagy and Siegel, some is analytical/critical, illuminating the difficulties and disagreements that resolved themselves into a program like no other. Any student of photography or modern art must know about this controversial and audacious adventure that was spun off from the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy, Arthur Siegel and the other subjects of this chronicle.

The authors explore some of these subjects. Why was the this such an important project and why was it controversial? What effect has it had? What does it teach us today? These are important questions simply because a large number of prominent and influential students passed through it.

No serious collection of late 20th century photographs can be without 20 or so of the prints from this group. Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ken Josephson, Ray Metzker, Linda Connor, Arthur Siegel, Art Sinsabaugh and many others all studied and taught there. Many went on the teach at places like R.I. School of Design, San Francisco Art Institute and many places in between. The influence of this group is much more extensive than its size and longevity would suggest.

At a time when the "giants" of the medium were devoted to "pure" photography, Moholy-Nagy appeared from Europe and proposed that photography be treated as a tool of graphic design. Light, texture, volume, rhythm, contrast and other elements were worth studying for their own sake in order to apply the unique strengths of photography to the art of design.

They produced something akin to Jazz. Painters like Motherwell, Johns, Rauschenberg were producing strikingly similar imagery. Paul Strand, Man Ray, Lartigue, Rodschenko and a many others had explored the same issues. The Bauhaus and the Chicago ID were an attempt to formalize the earlier experiments. Strand, Weegee, Winogrand, Blumenfeld and others contributed to the ID at various times.

The ID photographers showed how purely graphic aspects of the medium could be used to express a vision, used to dig subtle meaning from the mundane, used to reveal things in synthetic abstract that weren't visible. They expanded and elevated their medium in a very short, intense time. There is little in today's published graphics not already in the photographs of the students in this show.

An unintended consequence of this book is to have produced a key to much of abstract expressionist painting, and modern poetry. The photograph always contains an insistent link to "reality" that seems more obvious than it is in a painting, but it is no less a subject of the painter than the photographer. This show might be the trigger that makes other modern artists accessible to some people. I've recommended this book to some art teachers for this reason.

I have long been a fan of the work that came out of the Institute of Design from the 1940s-1960s. It was a highly creative and experimental time and environment. After fleeing Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, many Bauhaus design and photography educators set up shop in Chicago. They started a new school and a new method of teaching photography that emphasized experimenting with abtract forms and understanding the process of imagery through intense creative study. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy was the driving force for the early successes, along with Gyorgy Kepes and Nathan Lerner. After Maholy-Nagy died, Harry Callahan took over the job as photography head, and moved away slightly from the early experimentation period by trying to challenge his students into creating their own thesis statements. Some of the other artists that also attended or participated in this important school were Barbara Crane, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph Jachna, Kenneth Josephson, Arthur Siegel, & many others.

The book in in conjunction with the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago of the same title. The exhibition should not be missed if you are in the Chicago area, but if you cannot make it to the exhibition (which closes May 12, 2002), this book is a great representation of the exhibits masterpieces. Inside are hundreds of fine-art images from ID, along with interviews, quotes, in-depth commentaries, and a lot of really great candids of the artists. It is really worth it. And I would certainly suggest buying this book at Amazon...

If you have any interest in modern art or photography, this book is a fantastic history lesson on the impact of these innovators on the entire possibilities of the medium. The Institute of Design helped shape photography into an art form of its own, and to push the boundaries of the medium at the same time. What a great time it must have been!

A beautiful book, in all senses of the word. love life

The Pause is an excellent short story about the receipt of a unique Christmas gift. It is extremely well written, and the compositon of the book is excellent. It has become part of our annual Christmas matter.

I am studying Bussiness Administration at the Universidad de los Andes, Santiago Chile. The thing I liked the most about this book is it's great amount of examples aplicable to all scenarios, including our Latinamerican environment, and the chapters' content, follows a practical and logic sequence. I strongly suggest that the author should publish an addendum to be sold separately, with his best advice on the solution for the problems-cases proposed at the end of each chapter. It is amazing how important is the human resource, professionally managed, for modern and successful organizations, even in Latinamerica, where due to low foreign and local investment and high unemployment there is a surplus of qualified professionals.

Fred Luthans presents OB in a great light. While his text has many, many meta-data studies, it does provide a clear and concise view of OB.

A very good textbook for an introductory class on OB.

A wonderful book of eighty-five, beautifully printed, Dorothea Lange photos. I think the best ones are forty-seven from the thirties when Lange was part of a small group of photographers employed by the Government to record the plight of the rural poor. Their output (now in the Library of Congress and accessible to all) was the most complete photographic record of a nation ever undertaken. Lange and Walker Evans were, depending on your point of view, the most talented of this group and you can see why by looking at her photos in this book. Keith Davis says in the introduction... "Her photographs are at once bluntly factual and deeply sympathetic. While Lange recorded innumerable scenes of destitution, she consistently evoked the resilience, faith and determination of her subjects". I think her point-of-view comes across in all the work shown in this book. After the thirties the remaining photos cover her work up to 1958.

All the photos have dated captions and many have background information about what is being shown plus the thoughts of Lange and her subjects. The back of the book has a chronology, bibliography and print source. This is a lovely record of her photographic work but if you want to know more, these two books take a comprehensive look at her life, 'Dorothea Lange: American Photographs' by Therese Heyman, Sandra Phillips and John Szakowski and 'Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime' by Robert Coles.

BTW, this is the second book of American images I have reviewed in the last few days, the other one was a selection of photos taken over a number of years by British photographer Nick Waplington of a small town in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences (also the books title) but what a contrast, the Lange book has captions and other information, the photographer's thoughts, chronology, bibliography, sources while Waplington's book has none of this, not even page numbers! It raises questions (least to me) about how publishers regard their readers.

This text chronicles the depth of the Hallmark Cards photography collection through a carefully developed and well written scholarly history. Curator and author Keith F. Davis addresses the fundamental value of photographic imagery as demonstrated by many of the most significant makers in the past one hundred years. Using as a basis a single country's development (America) in the medium's history, Davis sets out his argument that many if not all successful photographs are inherently about the truthfulness of the images produced. He does not over interpret the documented images to establish a point of view but rather allows the flow of the photographs to reveal a rich tapestry of imagery beginning with the snapshot aesthetic of the late 19th century and ending with the mass media influences upon contemporary photographs. Many of the images have not been reproduced before -- always a plus! His thorough research is supported fully by extensive endnotes and an excellent bibliography. Best of all, the overall quality of image reproduction suggests to the reader the individual tonalities of the photographs. This second edition is a successful follow-up to the earlier catalogue of the same name (1995)and records the remarkable growth of this important collection of photographs.

I am a medical student at Texas A&M USHSC COM. This text is one of the worst I have ever owned. It is wrought with errors. There are numerous errors in the text. The diagrams are confusing and many are actually wrong. The wordy nature of the book is also a problem for most medical students, as the yield appears to be low (unlike Moore's: Clinically Oriented Anatomy). This text is listed as a required text at many medical schools, however, it should not be. Instead, I suggest *Langman's Medical Embryology. This is a much better choice for all interested in a clear and correct understanding of clinical embryology.

I have discussed this book in a comparative review of three human embryology texts:

Moore & Persaud, The Developing Human
Larsen, Essentials of Human Embryology
Sadler, Langman's Medical Embryology

This review can be found on the Amazon.com site under Sadler (ISBN 0-683-30650-2). In brief, I found Sadler to be the clearest and most useful of these three books, and Moore & Persaud to be the richest in clinical content but otherwise not as good as the other two.

THIS BOOK HAS REALLY HELPED TO UNDESTAND ABOUT EMBRYOLOGY WITH RESPECT TO THE HOLY QURAN , A HOLY SCRIPTURE OF MUSLIMS. I AM A DIETICIAN AND PERSONALLY FEEL THAT THIS IS A BOOK WITH LEAST ERRORS FOR ONLY THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND...........

This book provided us with the ability to learn and implement an entire Active Server Page website in about 4 weeks! Although we had no prior ASP knowledge, we were well versed in HTML, Visual Basic and SQL. Without question, this was and continues to be one of the single most important references we have at the office.

The book clearly explained Active Server Page objects such as Response, Request, and Server and gave us sample code that we were able to quickly use for our own project. The chapters on ADO provided us the tools we needed to implement a mission critical real-time web-based DB application.

We highly recommend this book!

"Using Active Server Pages" is hands-down the best reference on ASP on the market, IMHO. The section "Creating Your Own Active Server Components" saved my butt when a client "requested" that I learn to implement the MTS component model.

Others complain that this book is too basic, but this is unquestionably the real beauty of it. I bought the book with some ASP experience already under my belt, but was quickly and happily able to fill a whole bunch of holes in my knowledge and approach. I now feel that I have a solid foundation in ASP from which to expand and develop my skills. This book will be a core reference for me for a long time to come!

I really liked the way the book broke down ASP and provided examples of reusable code. Examples were either preceded or followed by detailed explanations of what would work and why it works. Unlike other ASP books I've looked at it, this book did its best to cover the range of possibilities with ASP. In addition, I appreciated the fact that the author included chapters of how ASP works using Visual InterDev, Transaction Server, and IIS. Well worth the money spent.

I found this book exremely biased, especially on its treatment of ethics and environmentalism, which were extremely collectivistic and altruistic. I felt like I was also overcharged for the text book, for something so vaguely written.

Most textbooks do a very poor job of addressing current issues in a clear, accurate, concise manner. This book, however, is to be commended. I especially found the resource information and discussion cases to be a tremendous benefit. The discussion questions and current event topics encourage the students to explore these issues outside of class, in their businesses and in the community. Business and society is a topic of extreme importance. Unfortunately, it often goes overlooked in so many universities and colleges. Overall, I rank this book as a worthwhile investment and hope the authors continue to explore these important issues in business and education.

I have asked for The 11th edition. This is the 10th edition.
This is not what I have asked for. It also took 11 days to get here.

I like the book because it is complete and easy to understand. It gives a lot of insights on how one's behavior is manifested. The structured presentations are accompanied by real life experiences. It is an easy reference guide even for a novice in organizational set-up. The only part I would like to suggest is that the authors should show an answer chapter for the quentions given in the end of the chapters especially in the case studies. I find it very interesting to know how the authors would solve the organizational problems.