Martin Luther: Exploring His Life and Times
by Helmar Junghans, and others
Fortress, CD-ROM, $39.00

Reformation Sunday (October 31) fast approaches. What better way to remember it (an event accelerated by a media—print—revolution) than by rehearsing in one of today's revolutionary media the life of the greatest Reformer.

To be frank, when this CD-ROM came to our offices, we were ready to shelve it with our other "multimedia" history discs, most of which simply throw together public-domain documents, easily accessible over the Internet, into a clunky browser.

Not this CD. The emphasis is on spending time getting to know Martin Luther and his world, not just finding out what year he became a doctor of theology (1512, in case you were wondering). The backbone of the CD is a narrative of Luther's life by Helmar Junghans, a Lutheran pastor and Luther scholar at the University of Leipzig, Germany. The text is linked to thousands of images, documents, timelines, maps, music, and other "extras" that turn a search for a quick fact into a delightful hour-long excursion.

Other options on the CD include listening to an actor read from Luther's sermons and writings, and special sections on travel, the printing press, purgatory, and other themes.

Our favorite area of the CD, though, is "Martin Luther: The Film." It's an animated film of Luther's life—historically accurate, but very, very funny. The narration is sincere, but whoever animated it was obviously a big Monty Python fan. We not only learned about Luther but had some mighty good laughs doing so.

The project was sponsored by ibm Deutschland in 1996 to commemorate the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Luther's death. But even though that sounds like three-year- old ...