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CHOICE Review

Editor Rosenthal has collected 43 essays on various aspects of documentaries and has written 7 introductory pieces. The essays cover both films and television programs and show a good international balance. Faced with any anthology, one must ask whether the separate choices have merit, whether the collection enhances their meaning by bringing them together, and whether the compiler has, by dint of arrangement and annotation, made the individual selections intelligible as a whole. Rosenthal garners high marks on all three accounts. In his introductory essays, he attempts to indicate topical cross-references, but his laudable efforts do not take the place of a subject index, difficult though its compilation might have been. This volume, with its topical approach to documentary, nicely complements Lewis Jacobs's The Documentary Tradition (2nd ed, 1979; 1st ed., CH, Jul '72), which covered the field from a historical point of view. The two do not duplicate selections, and a good mass communications library should contain both. T. A. Pallen Austin Peay State University