Even though this book provides a concise and easy to understand history of shoes in the 21st century, I was often exasperated while reading it. The writing style is easy to read and the quality of the photos is good, but the layout truly leaves much to be desired. Not only does the text rarely match the actual shoes that they’re talking about in more than general terms, but the designer biographies almost always broke up the narrative mid-paragraph! At least it’s a good browsing book, and gives lots of useful information so I’ll keep it around as a quick reference source. ( )

Organized by shoe type and then subcategory of shoe designers
Color photographs