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CHOICE Review

A pictorial survey, rather than a history, this book further deepens a worrisome trend in graphic design history: the manifestation of the belief, adopted from, yet long abandoned by, art history, that a visual history can be, and perhaps should be, a selected series of pictures. Connoisseurship in the published history of graphic design is the standard. Rather discussing the cultural, aesthetic, or social factors contributing both to making and understanding graphic design history, authors of such surveys simply report on a series of pictures by a series of western European and American men. This compendium of more than 400 images offers even less: it does not have the anticipated report on the selected graphics, which are presented without comment. The images are preceded by a quite perfunctory 17-page overview of the chronology of graphic design, and certainly do not "present all the significant designers of the twentieth century," as promised on the back cover. Designers as significant as Takenobu Igarashi, Kazumasa Nagai, Bradbury Thompson, Cipe Pineles, Lester Beall, Herb Lubalin, Deborah Sussman, Louise Fil, Paula Scher, Neville Brody, Steff Geissbuhler, and (most stunningly) April Greiman and many, many others are ignored. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students. R. M. Labuz Mohawk Valley Community College