There is a lot to like about Scarecrow's various Historical Dictionaries series. -Booklist The Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts cover, among other things, art and architecture, music, the media, cinema, theatre, and literature. Some deal with the activities of a given country, such as French Cinema or German Literature, others with specific time periods, such as Renaissance Art or Postmodernist Literature, while yet others focus on specific genres, such as Horror Cinema or Sacred Music. Between them, this expanding network of encyclopedias is covering more and more of the most interesting areas of research, scholarship, and general reader interest. Modelled after other successful historical dictionary series, each title includes as appropriate a chronology, list of acronyms, introduction, bibliography, and appendixes, and especially the central dictionary with entries on significant persons, works of art, styles and genres, themes and trends, technical innovations, and even commercial aspects. Many also have photos and illustrations. But the main emphasis is on descriptive text, enabling readers to garner an amazing amount of information in a carefully constructed reference work, with all sections focusing on the same topic and entries within the dictionary section cross-referenced to one another.