Customer Reviews

Careers for History Buffs and Others Who Learn from the Past, 3rd Ed. (Careers for You Series)

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It is fascinating what authors, editors and publishers think they can pass off as a "reference" or a "guide" and how little regard they have for readers' common sense. This book is little more than an outline for a class or seminar without the student participation. In fact, the information is so bare-boned that it demonstrates the author would hardly have enough expertise to actually teach such a class or seminar. History majors, beware: even if your college has a poor placement program, it will still have covered more than this book.Clearly an assigned project in which the author indiscriminately listed every resource stumbled upon, the acknowledgements and interviews still take up more pages than the resources. Practical advice is dispensed with a headline and a mere paragraph or two while the interviews are banal and bland. The most offensive appendix listing: the author's own web site where she'll "help" teach you the steps towards getting your fiction published! She seems to specialize in subjects which simply cannot be taught. The reader should take the author's own advice from page 9: "Don't forget the Internet...fire up any search engine and enter key words such as 'history,' 'jobs,' 'museums,' 'curators,' and so on. A well-defined search will bring you to some interesting and helpful websites." Better yet, skip the insult of having paid for this book entirely and go directly online; it'll prove much more informative.

Very Nearly Useless would be a great title for this book. It is quite inconsistent and poorly balanced-some chapters are composed entirely of anecdotes and interviews, with no practical information whatsoever, while others are no more than dry lists of steps involved in pursuing the career in question. (there are a few chapters slightly more informative than the rest, in which some practical information seems to have been accidently sprinkled amongst the anecdotes.)
The author's approach to the reading audience is also off-kilter; most chapters seem to assume the reader is a mature individual already in possession of a lucrative and well-established career who is merely looking for a change of pace. Only the chapter on archaeology seems directed at students-and it is addressed entire at students. One would suppose from this text that it is quite impossible to pursue a career in archaeology (or museum studies) unless one begins as an undergraduate at a tender age.
The most outrageous thing about this book is the inclusion of minimum wage interships and unpaid volunteer jobs among the "careers". To my mind, a career by definition must support the person performing in it. Volunteering or minimum wage jobs may be useful experience-gaining activities in pursuit of a career, but that was not how they were presented in the text.
Anything substantive this book might have to say could be found online-including anecdotes from people in the careers in question (eg. in chat rooms, on posting boards.) Save your money.

This book gives you a good place to start investigating careers if you have a background in history. It can point you in directions you may not have thought of.