Synagogues (The Great Architecture Series)

Rating:
Summary: Engaging and attractive
Review: Gruber is a casual and enthusiastic writer and states up front that he is relatively new to the subject. Its nuggets of information are concise and perfectly appropriate for a beginning student. The photographs alone are worth the price of the book but if you're looking to identify the synagogues and the details in the photos, you may have to do a bit of wandering since the captions are scattered about and are set in very small type. Put aside your qualms about the editorial judgements and the publisher's intent and enjoy this book if you can find it.

Rating:
Summary: What's Wrong With This Picture?
Review: What's wrong is that Samuel Gruber basically gets away with a slipshod job because books on synagogue architecture are hard to find, expensive to produce and scholarship is limited. So, if you're starting a collection you simply can't NOT have "Synagogues," from The Great Architecture Series.

The book's necessity, however, doesn't make it a good book. And neither do the undeniably beautiful photographs. I don't know if The Great Architecture Series produces all books this way, but "Synagogues" looks to have been done "on the cheap." Many photographs are printed without margins and too many have captions on a different page, some even have captions more than one page away, so one is forced to flip back and forth between pages to look at a building and to read about it. This spells C-H-E-A-P. It's even hard to identify the cover photograph and those immediately inside. Detail shots can hang you up seemingly forever.

It's like the old excuse for buying "Playboy Magazine" -- but in reverse. Buy this book, NOT for the articles, only for the pictures. The text is disorganized, unhelful, incomplete and a little shy of accurate for some of the sticklers among us.

However, Samuel Gruber has, to date, done what no one else has --assembled a coffee table book on synagogue architecture around the world and throughout history. And he's to be justly credited with that achievement. The book provides hours of enjoyment and is sure to open the eyes of many a neophyte synagogue architecture scholar and any lay readers. I'd suggest the book as an ideal bat/bar mitzvah gift, but if you care to send the very best, you'd better wait until something better comes along. I'd buy the book only for a good friend and would present it with lots of caveats like "I know the captions are hard to find, but the pictures are so pretty..."