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This book focuses on the avant-garde graphic design of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the Soviet Union and Germany, with a concluding chapter on the transposition of modernist values in industrial design through the work of Moholy-Nagy in Chicago between 1937 and 1946. The impact of the early Soviet avant-garde in art and architecture has been the subject of many books, and Margolin (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) synthesizes much previous research in an attempt to define the relationship between form and larger social concerns. The book suffers, however, from careless editing as well as from errors in translation and in factual content. Occasionally there are monumental gaffes. On page 208 we are told--twice in the same paragraph--that a design by Rodchenko depicts the poet Mayakovsky standing in front of a panoramic view of Moscow. In fact it is a view of New York and the Brooklyn Bridge, that icon of modernity to which Mayakovsky devoted one of his greatest poems. The poem, as well as the rich context of this image, should be known to any specialist in Soviet culture. Although not all of the book's mistakes are so serious, their cumulative effect raises questions about the reliability of this work. Faculty.