Career Success Vocabulary Course, Vol. 1

"I've had to learn to judge carefully the work other people do for me and not to be captious." That's one of the simpler, but uniformly lackluster, business-oriented sentences in the first volume of this 4-video vocabulary builder that was originally released on audiocassette. The key word in the quoted sentence is "captious," and that's precisely what I'm about to be: a quibbling sort. 100 words are presented in two parts (it's not clear why there's a separation, nothing is different in the two segments). With no preamble, each of the 100 words is offered first in one of the aforementioned badly written sentences, followed by a repeat of the sentence with the featured word defined. An enclosed booklet includes a few tests. While there are some great words here, some of them are not particularly related to business ("misanthrope") or terribly useful in the context in which they are used. Why on Earth would a salesperson say that he or she had been "peripatetic" recently, instead of "on the road"? The audio versions might be useful, but the video medium (the entire visual content is onscreen text) is utterly wasted here. Not recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)