HISTORY OF ART FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

History Of Art For Young People (632 pp.; $49.50; Feb. 1997; 0- 8109-4150-3): A quarter-century after it was first published as the high-school student's edition of H.W. Janson's History of Art (1962), this one-stop compendium for those researching any aspect of Western art history has evolved to an even higher level of elegance and accessibility. It provides ready definitions of and contexts for terms, concise histories of the cultures into which art movements were born, relevant diagrams of technical processes, succinct entries on important artists, and descriptions and full-color—often full-page—reproductions of the works that defined them. Anthony Janson, the son of H.W. (d. 1982), covers and updates the territory of previous editions, and brings the coverage up to the present. For research, for browsing, or as a desk reference, this excellent volume— overhauled but still (as Kirkus predicted in 1972) the standard in its field—surpasses even its rivals on CD-ROM. (b&w photographs and drawings, diagrams, maps, chronologies, glossary, further reading, index) (Reference. 10+)