Customer Reviews

The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind

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Bluffers beware: owners of this well-written, surprisingly entertaining tome (1096 pages, a bit over 4 pounds) are likely to settle any fact-based argument on the spot. Whether the argument concerns what year K.C. Jones was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, or who the great figures of Iraqi mythology might be, or what famous people originally hailed from New Hampshire, a dip into these pages will prove you right or wrong.

There are three main sections: The Arts; Economics, Business and Finance; and Science and Technology. Each chapter (Dance, Geography, Mathematics, Literature and Drama, Medicine, Sports, etc) starts off with a succinct but comprehensive history. For example, "Architecture" moves from the Paleolithic to Skyscrapers in 11 pages, managing to define Byzantine and list the great works of Frank Lloyd Wright without skipping the Baroque. Each chapter highlights the famous people in its field and concludes with a glossary of terms.

"Times" writers have contributed essays throughout, including Steve Kinzer on Jelly Roll Morton, Jane Brody on Hypertension, and Nicholas Wade on the future of human evolution. The back of the book is a treasure trove of facts: a language usage guide, a crossword puzzle dictionary, vital statistics of the world's nations and the U.S. states, a list of award-winners, a dictionary of food, a wine primer, a guide to nutrition, and a biographical dictionary of 1,000 people. This is one of those books you didn't know you needed till you had it.

A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind -- General, Reference, Trivia, Reference / General ==I started off with this book by having a question: What is the capital of Uruguay. ==After all, a Guide to Essential Knowledge should contain such facts. Further they should be easy to find (well indexed), the page referenced should be easy to find, and the information on the page should be easy to distinguish from the rest of the page. ==Well I turned to the index, yup, there was Uruguay - page 857. 'Turned to page 857, this was in the section Nations of the World, Uruguay was in bold face type and underlined in the middle of the left hand column. A couple of inches from the top of the Uruguay entry it said, Capital: Montevideo. The book certainly passed the first test. ==Then I started flipping through the book. I found the Hundred Words Most Frequently Misspelled - I won't bother to mention how many of these I frequently mizzpel. ==As with any of these omnibus type books, the selection of what material to include is always a problem. You can't put in everything and still be able to lift it. So far, everything I've looked for I've found, what more can I add.

For those who said this book doesn't have anything you couldn't find in your local library. Well, duh. This book doesn't have anything you couldn't find in the library, or faster yet, online. The entire point is the organization, having everything at hand in a concise manner. You'd have to do some searching and clicking to get all the information about one subject that this book stuffs into a few pages, and you wouldn't get them in concise, logical order without repetition. Obviously, this book doesn't go ultra in depth or cover every subject area. Even whole encyclopedia sets can't do that. The best part of the book, in my opinion, is it tells you what you need to know. If you want to be fairly knowledgeable in any given subject really quickly, its useful to not have to read a lot of books/internet sources and then figure out what part of the information you can/should retain.

The Internet has pushed collections like this towards irrelevance, but this book's clear organization and attractive design make it a welcome resource. The text is organized into about 30 main topics (e.g. 'History') and each main topic is composed of several subtopics ('World History', 'Major Wars in History' and 'History of the Unites States'). These main topics and subtopics appear at the top of every page and provide high accessibility. The book also contains a biographical dictionary and almanac-like lists and tables. Makes a great gift (my sister gave it to me).

We've given the NY Times "Essential Guide" as a gift to incoming college freshmen. Our thinking is that in the course of their course reading, they might come across terms or ideas that an author assumes they know, but which they are not actually familiar with (for example, a reference to a particular philosopher or writer). The "Guide" gives them a place to quickly learn what the reference means so they can then go on with their reading.

This book have become my substitute brain. Not really a lexicon, not really a thriller novel -- though a little bit of both, this book is really something special. It is simply a great work of reference, from the biography-pages that has the basic info on just about anyone, to a list of the most common misspellings in the English language, and the correct way to spell them. But I often find me just flipping to a random page, and learning completely new things about the Mesopotamian empires...

The amount of information packed into this book is amazing. More importantly, the ease with which one can dig out facts on any subject makes you really believe this book has everything about everything.

Yes, the NYT Guide to Essential Knowledge is jam-packed with information. But it is also so boring that you will need toothpicks to hold your eyelids up after more than a couple pages. It reads worse than a High School history book--lots of names and dates, cold hard facts, etc., but very little to stimulate one's interest. It also leans a bit too much towards political correctness for my tastes, for example, allotting more space to African literature than to Japanese literature, even though Japanese literature spans approximately 11,000 years and African literature a few hundred.

If you are looking for a reference book only, this book fits the bill. If you are learning for pleasure, and want to be entertained and stimulated as well as to learn new things, I suggest you keep looking.

This book is marketed as a book of facts, and the other user reviews support this. I, however, see this as much more than a compendium of facts. This book is the ideal summary of everything one ought to know. While Google and Wikipedia would offer info-grabbers the answers faster, this 'textbook' provides a concise summary to just about everything, and can be read section by section, just like a textbook. It is quite literally a condensed 101 course to every subject you would find in a university's undergraduate catalog. It is a beacon of light in an era where 'training' has replaced education. If I were the founder of a college, I would make this book the required textbook for freshmen students. It is an introduction to everything everyone should know.

While many will say this book is good for trivia (and I am sure it is), I believe its main purpose is to find apposite information in a timely manner for the owner. Google is a very nice place to get information. But to walk to the computer, log on, perform a search, and sift through the results is a several step process taking time. Whereas, if one is looking for the Nobel Prize winner from three decades ago, or where the Olympics were held in the 1950's, all one needs to do is open this book up, and they will find the information very quickly. Much quicker than the internet, blasphemous as that may be in this internet-is-all era.

It should be noted that this does have its shortcomings however. In the medical section, "common" diseases are listed in alphabetical order, and believe it or not epilepsy is not listed, but Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is! Under the heading for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, it even says that approximately 1,000 cases are reported in the United States each year. If that is indeed the case, how did that make it onto their list of common diseases, when epilepsy is in fact one of the most common diseases affecting millions of people? They make no mention of their methodology for including, or not including, particular diseases, but oversights on areas such as this make me question the value of publications such as this. But even with that omission, this is a nice reference book to have on hand.

The internet clearly has its place as the place to go for exhaustive information on nearly any subject, but it should be noted that the tactile experience of books will never be replaced by silicon. To paraphrase mark Twain's famous expression: The reports of the demise of books have been greatly exaggerated.