REVOLUTION TO RIGHT HC (Distinguished Studies in American Legal and Constitutional History)

The search software for this multimedia CD-ROM is by Compton's NewMedia and is called M.O.S.T. (Multiple Operating Systems Technology), which cleverly makes a single disc usable with MS-DOS, Windows, and the Sony Multimedia Player. And there's more cleverness, including a "virtual workplace" that allows many kinds of clipping and storing. The software is nifty, but the content is puzzling. The expected biographical articles and statistical data concerning presidents and vice presidents are present, along with pictures (not impressive), and sound clips (not available on our equipment). Then, as if in acknowledgment that all that information could be presented in a slim book (with some decided advantages), a whole lot of other data is thrown in, including an elaborate dictionary with a thesaurus and foreign words and phrases. Also included are irrelevant databases containing, for example, common English given names (men and women), and populations of places in the US and Canada; and numerous miscellaneous tables (e.g. metric system, Bible books, chemical elements, planets data). These questions arise: why and for whom is this product conceived, why is the marketing/packaging so silent on the contents, and does the same basic bank of data serve to pad out other products from this company? Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.