Customer Reviews

The Columbia Encyclopedia: Fifth Edition

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Sometimes you don't feel like booting up the PC and loading the Encyclopedia Britanica just to look up a passing fancy. This is the book to give you enough information to understand the reference without bogging you down with too much detail.

The amazing thing about this encyclopedia is I often prefer it to my Britannica CD (or the online service). It's faster, more to the point, and has a surprising number of very clear and helpful illustrations and charts (all the Supreme Court Justices and their dates, p. 2659; a schematic for an iron blast furnace, p. 310).
It's also a great gazetteer (Inuvik - Northwest Territories Candada, pop. 8,491, with a whole darn paragraph on the place!).
The only downside is that as impressive as this thing is, it has to be brief. Only 2 sentences on King Khufu of Egypt, for example, seems a bit unfair, but such is life. (On the up side, they give 16 lines to my favorite writer H.H.Munro, aka Saki.)

This book never ceases to amaze me. It has information that one would never dare to hope would be there and it is written with such originality and brilliance. How I wish I had discovered it years ago.