Rating: 
Summary: it seemed like a good idea, but....
Review: ...it's just not an effective way to learn kanji. In this book each kanji has a little picture associated with it, which may be helpful if you're curious about what a kanji looks like, but if you're trying to learn kanji efficiently and hope to retain what you learn I don't find this book very useful.
One problem with it is it can't help you with much else besides recognition, looking at a kanji and knowing what it is. If you're trying to use this book to learn kanji, then the basic steps you'd follow would be: 1) look at the kanji, 2) what picture does the kanji look like, 3) what is the meaning based upon this picture. First of all, there are a lot of kanji which look very similar, so it may be difficult to keep them straight if you're trying to remember what a kanji "looks like". So even recognition itself is difficult. Second, even if you do remember correctly what it "looks like", you may have trouble then recalling what the meaning of that kanji is, since sometimes that meaning is very abstract, or you could incorrectly come up with alternate meanings.
Another major problem is that it doesn't do much good if you want to recall how to write a kanji given it's meaning. If you recall what the picture is given the meaning, it doesn't mean you'll necessarily write it correctly.
Instead of this book I'd highly recommend Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". The sole purpose of his book is to learn how to remember the meaning and writing of kanji; there's no japanese whatsoever in it. But it turns out this is a really effective method. His guide is really just a set of mnemonics, or memory tricks essentially, to help you remember the kanji. He introduces rougly 2000 kanji to you, and in an order which facilitates you learning all of them. Instead of associating a picture with each kanji, you associate a little story, and from the story you can remember how to write it. You'll need to know that many kanji eventually anyways, so you may as well learn all their meanings right away. I was skeptical at first, but once I started trying it I was learning kanji at an amazing pace. In the first week alone I memorized the meaning of 300 kanji (I spent a lot of time studying though, it just shows that it's possible). I'd also recommend using an computer flashcard program, one that allows you to write your own flashcards and test yourself on your computer (I used a good one called VTrain). It's much more convenient this way than writing them on index cards. 2000 sounds like a lot of kanji, but you'd be surprised at how fast you can learn them if you're diligent. I found that it was much easier to learn the readings of the kanji once I already knew all the readings. Trying to learn both at once will really slow you down. Plus knowing the meaning of the kanji is the most important part. Even if I don't recognize a word, I can usually get it's general meaning based upon what the kanji means. If you're still skeptical, consider how many years it takes Japanese children to learn all the kanji, and these are kids that already speak Japanese fluently. You can't expect to learn kanji the same way they do and learn it much quicker than them.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for the coffee table or bathroom!
Review: An enjoyable, well presented book, though more for entertainment than a serious study aid.If you really want to learn Kanji then try Ken Henshall's "Remebering the Japanese Characters". Kodansha's Let's Learn Kanji/Let's Learn More Kanji are really helpful too.
Rating: 
Summary: More Memorable Mnemonics
Review: Another good book by Michael Rowley. I like that he presents a radical, gives it meaning, and shows it used with other radicals and their respective meanings. He also gives both the Chinese and Japanese reading for each symbol, so theorectically, this book could be used for students of Chinese as well. I find his drawings to be very helpful in remembering the symbols, because they are so interesting and memorable. He also gives a guide on how to use the entries for each kanji, and an index. He gives mnemonic devices for the kana in the beginning of the book, but they are different from the ones in Kana Pict-O-Graphix and I personally don't like them as much.
An index in which you can find the kanji for a specific english word would have been helpful, as well as notes on stroke order and creation of the characters. However, the point of this book is to remember the kanji, so Rowley probably assumes that you already know how to create the characters. He also states that he leaves out common kanji because he couldn't come up with a mnemonic device for them, and puts in kanji not approved for common use because they are interesting to him. But other than that, I would definitely recommend this book if you need help remembering the kanji.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, interesting, and fun!
Review: As a visual person who makes up his own mnemonic devices to remember all sorts of things, I fully appreciate Rowley having done the work for me with the kana and kanji. It must have been painstaking but enjoyable.
I bought this book primarily for the kana, but have spent hours perusing the kanji for the sheer joy of it. I now recognize and understand many kanji I never really tried to learn.
If you also want to write the kana and kanji, you need other books for the pen strokes, in addition to (not instead of!) Rowley. Start with Heisig's "Remembering the Kana."
Rating:
Summary: A New Twist
Review: As an intermediate supplement, it's perfect! This book is a wonderful help of explaining the radicals the kanji are made up of.. so when you run across it again, it will be easier to learn. It's helpful in use alongside a more traditional academic course - it lightens it up and gives a fresh perspective!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful for learning kana!
Review: At first glance this book looks like the way to solve the problem of learning those tedious kanji in Japanese! It looks like a completely NEW way to do it! But I am not sure it is. Firstly, I have to say that some of the pictures are good for learning the meaning in relation to the shape of the kanji, like the one on the front...but what about the ON and KUN readings? They still have to be learned somehow! They are included in the book, but the kanji are not placed in any context that might help you relate them to vocabulary. This is an interesting innovation which is, I daresay, helpful, but not definitive. However, I can say with my hand on my heart that Mr Rowley took a lot of the pain out of learning the kana with the ingenious drawings he came up with (even if the pronunciation is ostensibly American!).
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful but not as helpful as it could have been
Review: First, let me say that I (being a student of Japanese of 2 years) love browsing through this book. The art is beautiful, the mnemonics usually make sense (except a few cases where you can tell that Rowley had a bit of a hard time thinking up mnemonics for things), and the radical categorization system is excellent. However, as a study aid, i found the value of this book is questionable. I missed being able to see how the kanjis work within a compound of kanji-kana/kanji-kana (as most words in Japanese are). Also, while the book features a kanji and its Ohn/Kun readings, which occasionally will have a different meaning, it doesn't specify exactly which meaning corresponds with which. As someone with a limited vocabulary at this point of her studies, I learned a lot from this book, at least where reading is concerned. I COULD have learned even more from it had they bothered to add this valuable snippet of information to each item in the book.
Rating:
Summary: It made me to love Kanjis!
Review: I am a forein student in Japan. Last year I started to study Japanese after coming ti Japan. It was extremely difficult to memorize Kanjis and I failed my first Kanji exam. Then a I started to study kanjis using Kanji Pict-O-Graphix : Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics by Michael Rowley, it changed the way I looked at kanjis. It is giving easy eaxmples that you can remember easily. I think that there is no better way to learn kanjis.
Rating:
Summary: Highly reccomended, great visual & written mnemonics
Review: I have bought lots of Kanji books and this is one of my favorites. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to learn to read the Kanji characters. The visual and written mnemonics really helped me remember the characters. The book is broken down by subjects; some include the world, food, body, people and animals. For each word the Kanji character, reference #, English meaning and visual/text mnemonic are show. On and Kun readings, as well as the schematic of elements are also included. There is a Kanji index in the back.My only wishes were that it had the romaji translation and contained information on how to write the characters.
Rating:
Summary: Clever mneomonics, lousy organization, incompleate reference
Review: I must admit this book has the smartest mneomonics of all the kanji books I bought. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover all the standard kanji and lacks the stroke order pictures found in other books.
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