Don't know much about history," crooned Sam Cooke. Herman's Hermits agreed, and so did Art Garfunkel. But history is now a big multimedia subject, with enough zippy titles to get even Herman's Hermits up to speed.
The gold standard in serious fun is set by Dorling Kindersley, the UK publisher of high-quality illustrated books, which has a multimedia division of 300 people beavering away in London and New York. Its Eyewitness History of the World opens onto the image of a rolltop desk complete with virtual books, a document drawer, a globe, a display case, a quiz game, and artifacts from 12 historical periods. You click on a q'in (a kind of zither), for example, to hear ancient Chinese music. By the time you get to the jazz age, the q'in has been replaced by a tenor saxophone. Jules Verne would have loved the time-traveling globe that pops you to parts of the world throughout history.
The Our Times Multimedia Encyclopedia of the 20th Century is based on the book Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century from Turner Publishing. Linked by a timeline that covers the century either year by year or decade by decade, the work bundles together film clips, charts, graphs, video tours narrated by James Earl Jones, and critical essays by luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke and James Gleick. The book is easier to digest than the CD-ROM, but the disc has one added feature that vaults it into the pantheon of reference tools it's bundled with the fifth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia. This is the best one-volume encyclopedia in existence.
A more specialized work less fun to use, but rich in its own way is The War in Vietnam. Macmillan Digital assembled 1,000 news articles from The New York Times with 40 minutes of video footage from the CBS News archives. Into the mix were thrown 750 still photos, a bibliography, links to related sites on the Internet, and a search engine that can pull a name off "The Wall" in seconds. What's lacking is an intelligent voice telling you what all this stuff means (I don't know who would be up to the task), but the work is a treasure trove for people who want to search the archives on their own.
Don't know much about history? Get with the program, Sam.
Eyewitness History of the World: US$39.95. DK Multimedia: (800) 225 3362, +1 (508) 661 1323, on the Web at www.dk.com/. The War in Vietnam: $49.95. Macmillan: (800) 910 0099, +1 (201) 767 5937, on the Web at www.macdigital.com/. Our Times Multimedia Encyclopedia of the 20th Century: $69.95. Vicarious: (800) 465 6543, +1 (415) 610 8300, on the Web at www.vicarious.com.
STREET CRED
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