Rating: 
Summary: Great reference for many obscure or hard-to-define concepts
Review: This is a collection of capsule entries for key ideas in modern culture. The entires are frequently much too long and too detailed to represent merely definitions, but they are brief enough to satisfy the curiosity of most readers, and to stay very focused. The best thing about this book is that the entries themselves are so very well researched and balanced, albeit often uninspired. The author has a real knack for cutting to the core of each idea right from the start, and then exposing the strongest view of both advocates and critics of that idea. There is a strong sense of the author attempting to be objective in each case, rather than trying to add his own spin. This is much closer to a true reference in style than an entertaining or satirical work like Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary." While it does a good job as a reference for the curious, the entries don't really hold your interest well enough to read it through from cover to cover. This book has one very baffling aspect. Throughout the text, it is completely devoid of references or "further reading" suggestions ! For a book intended as a resource for curious readers, this is hard to explain and very disappointing. There is a small section at the very end with 3 pages of general reference works. Like the entries in the text, these are particularly well chosen, however there is no way to know how to proceed to further investigate any particular topic in the text. The author is not an academic, but prepared the book with the assistance of many scholars. Even so, it seems to me that after all the research that Chris must have gone through to compose many of these superb and hard-to-define entries, he would have wanted to show where he got the information and where to get more. There is also the neccessary limitation of size, this book is less than 500 pages, so many interesting topics have been omitted. This is a good, informative book covering in extremely lucid entries even the most difficult topics, many of which are otherwise nearly impossible to define without wading through difficult specialized texts. If the author had included some reading suggestions with each entry, and the publisher had the confidence to expand this to something closer to the 800 pages of Kenneth McLeish's "Key Ideas In Human Thought," this would have been a superb reference book. As it stands, it is a wonderful companion to McLeish, and I anxiously await the next volume if Chris continues this very valuable work. For those using this as a starting place for building a library of reference works on modern ideas in general, it is probably also worth mentioning the dated but classic 5 volume reference book of concepts, "The Dictionary of the History of Ideas," 1973, from Scribner.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect for Your Desk
Review: You have to applaud Chris Rohman for what had to be a herculean effort to put this book together. He may have been inspired to write the book because he wanted to know more about 'dialectical materialism' but the book clearly took on a life of its own. And thank God it did. I have this book sitting on my desk as I type, and it has proven invaluable for looking up ideas and movements that I know little about. This book is also useful if, you are feeling particularly curious, and you want to learn about some of the major ideas in history. You can open this book and, after reading 30 or 40 pages, you'll feel very enlightened. Thank Chris for creating a book that fills the gap in any sensible desk reference set.
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