Here is a directory that enables the user to quickly ascertain whether there is a museum somewhere in the United States associated with a famous American. Although there are many entries for American presidents, individuals who achieved fame in the fields of education, business, literature and the arts are well represented. If you had a patron who was doing research on Thomas Edison, by looking under the subject heading for inventors then the subheading for Edison, you would get a biographical synopsis of Edison’s accomplishments, plus information about the six museums associated with him. Danilov’s writing style makes the people and places come alive. He skillfully interweaves descriptions of each museum with the biographical details, giving the reader a feel for what each place has to offer that could further his or her understanding of the person’s life and legacy. The author might have done us more of a service had he personally visited these museums and provided more in the way of hard-hitting critical assessment. We can’t really tell whether this or that museum lives up to its billing. The lack of photographs is another real shortcoming of this source. What few photographs the author did include are not only boring but technically defective.

Comparing Danilov’s book with The Official Museum Directory (American Association of Museums, 2012), I found that the former is, in some respects, more helpful to the researcher than the latter because, in cases where there is more than one museum associated with a certain person, they are listed sequentially in Danilov’s book. Taking the example of the six museums associated with Edison, I might not be able to travel to New Jersey to visit the granddaddy of Edison museums—the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, but one of the others might be within driving distance. Using The Official Museum Directory, I probably would not realize that these other five existed. Finding them requires some prior knowledge as to their geographic location since many of the smaller museums that were treated as separate and distinct entries in Danilov’s book are buried within other entries in The Official Museum Directory. Try looking up “Edison” in The Official Museum Directory and you will see why Danilov’s book fills a gap. While you can look up museums by name, there is no index in The Official Museum Directory that correlates with the names of the people who built the institutions, themselves, or who are memorialized by those institutions. The Danilov directory is a recommended purchase.