The best science & technology encyclopedia of its class (affordable desktop size of less than 1000 pages). Articles are lengthy and meaty. Well indexed and well illustrated; excellent cross-indexing indicating pre- and post- requisite articles. Content of articles is very up to date and just right regarding level of sophistication for the intelligent lay public: not watered down yet not too difficult. Articles are interesting and thought provoking, taking the reader beyond mere comprehension of empirical scientific facts toward deeper understanding and meaning.

Whether you are a serious student of science and/or technology, or just posess a casual interest in the broad spectrum of the two subjects, this book is as slick as they get. It's packed with tons of useful information from the inner workings of computers, to the amazing physics behind our universe. It's beautifully organized (each entry points you to what item in the book you should read before and after the current one), it's filled with excellent color illustrations and photos, and it never gets boring browsing the 1000+ entries. Dinosaurs, CD-ROM drives, radiology, astronomy, great people of science, great inventions, and on and on. This book is highly reccomended, and serves up information that could have easily been broken up into multiple books. A must buy.

Written for even the casual reader on scientific matters, this volume filters out the redundant and the superfluous, wrings the waste from scientific understanding and allows the reader to digest information in intellectual mouthfuls, rather than being goose-fed with more than can be understood. Exceptionally appropriate volume for secondary students as a supplement to cultural literacy studies. Easily implemented for gifted students.

There are some books about science that ignite the imagination, sparking a lifelong fascination about the book's subject... and then there is Science Matters, which did a good job of convincing me that I will never be a scientist. From the very first pages of the book to the last, the authors' condescending tone rings through every word. Eventually (after about, say, page 5) the patronizing attitude that almost oozes from each chapter becomes unbearable. Unfortunately, matters are not improved by the dullness of the text, which, in spite of its relative lucidity, still has a potent soporific effect.

I cannot understand the negative review by the reader from Oakton. I did not find a "condescending tone" or "patronizing attitiude" anywhere in this book. On the contrary, I have great appreciation for the authors' ability to cover essentially all the fundamentals of modern science in a pleasant and stimulating way. What they have done is to produce a kind of "science for poets" course that would be suitable at the high school or college level. They focus each of the 18 chapters on a single great idea of science, e.g., ch.1 ("The Universe is knowable and preditable."), ch.9 ("Everything is made of quarks and leptons."), ch.16 ("All life is based on the same genetic code.").

Of course this is not as detailed as a textbook, but by the same token, it does not wear you out or stuff you to the gills with more than you can digest. Another very pleasant aspect is the absence of the usual arm-twisting you'd get in a course: none of those bloody, in-your-face "learning objectives," no tests, no homework, no lists to memorize. Since the authors are both college teachers, they showed great restraint and wisdom in shunning that assiduous approach, which most teachers (myself included) tend to deploy in their daily work. They give you enough to develop a broad outline, but not so much as to kill your interest. Three cheers for their demonstration of top-quality science teaching.

P.S. I found a smattering of errors in those few chapters where I was knowledgeable, but these are all minor and will hardly be noticed by most readers, let alone detract from the overall learning experience.

This book gives you as much information as a classroom textbook, but it is a lot more interesting. I felt this was an excellent book because there are not many books that provide as much information as this one and that are actually a good read. I had a hard time putting this book down once I started to read it.

An interesting exploration of scientific wonders in easy to read 3 page sections. As the author says , this is not meant to be read cover to cover.

If, like me, you were learning to fix cars or skipping class when everyone else in your high school was dissecting frogs, but you always had an interest in science, this book is well worth reading.

It's more of a spot-reference book than anything else; for detailed information, you'd need to look elsewhere. The author takes a brief, yet informative look at some of the hottest topics in science today (while pointing out that what's foremost in the popular mind isn't always what researchers are most interested in). Some of the questions are as old as thought itself: why does the universe exist? Why do we get old? Why haven't we cured the common cold? Will we ever invent a thinking machine?

There's stuff in here that's been examined in science fiction, and a few theories so esoteric that I suspect even Larry Niven never would have thought of them. You come away with the realization that, contrary to what they teach you in school, science *doesn't* have all the answers; scientists look at the universe with as much wonder and curiosity as the rest of us

Trefil's book does contain 101 of the most fascinating unanswered questions of our time. This book is an excellent source for grad students looking for a dissertation as well as for the average person just wanting to learn a little more on science. Admittedly he doesn't go into a lot of detail, but that is part of the books charm, he keeps it short.

Yes. That's right - i said a place to *start* your research journey.

This is in no way, shape, or form a book that will help you write a paper, pass a history course, or understand some obscure literary reference in a poem.

If you read it, however, you may just impress Jay Leno when he does his "Jay Walking" segments on the Tonight Show.

For what it is - an all purpose guide to Western / american culture - it does a good job. I've referenced my copy many times over the years. ie When I'm watching a movie set during the life and times of Horatio Nelson, I've looked up Nelson in the book. When I'm reading a book that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, I've referenced quite a few things.

Is this the entire history of Western / American culture? NO. It's a thumbnail sketch with many, many holes.

It is however, quite informative and interesting.

As long as you understand what it is and what it isn't - I'd recommend the book.

The first edition of "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" was published in 1988 and this second edition came out five years later. Almost twice that amount of time has expired and we have yet to see a third edition, which is sorely needed. I was considering this work as a reference book for students in a popular culture class, but the contemporary period was already underrepresented, even without the update. You cannot really claim cultural literacy when "Madonna" is only "A work of art depicting Mary, the Mother of Jesus, especially one that shows her holding the infant Jesus." Actually this volume is a bit more than a dictionary because the entries are often longer than what you would expect to find in a traditional dictionary. Effort has been made to provide appropriate contexts and, more importantly, cross references to related words; cultural associations even have their own special little symbol. However, if you are dealing with non-contemporary literature the first two sections on the Bible and Mythology & Folklore provide a solid foundation for understanding the illusions often found in great books. The World and American History sections are certainly passable, but that is the sort of information you can find in much better reference books. I have found the World and American Politics sections to be more useful and would recommend those teaching Government classes look them over. However, many sections on science seem to me to be at least padded if not outright unnecessary. For a dictionary on CULTURAL literary I do not think we need to cover "saliva," "flower" and "carnivore." Being able to identify the differences between the Marx Brothers is culturally important and you might be able to make a case for understanding how gonorrhea affects each of the sexes, but recognizing the different types of rock is going too far a field. Still, "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" could well be a worthwhile addition to your desk reference set.

Everytime I read a novel, poem, or essay, there is invaribly a literary illusion, historical mention, or theme that I know nothing about. At this point, out pops the good old Dictionary of Culteral Literacy. Its a book of knowledge that quickly covers many different topics that one day in your life you might need to know a quick fact about. I use this book as my general Cliff's notes.

This is another sumptuously produced book from the National Geographic Society. The text is a little "mickey-mouse" by my standards, but the photos, many from NASA planetary missions are Hubble, are beautifully reproduced and well worth the price of admission.

The book is divided into sections: inner planets, outer planets, and deep space, with text and photos (in that order) for each.
Nicely done and well worth browsing.

The book goes from the sun and the solar system, through galaxies and nebulas, up to the edges of the known universe, giving great and worthy images (and info) in each "station", all printed on a high quality paper, of course. Especially good are the images from the galaxies and nebulas. Those from the near planets I liked a bit less, and I've seen better ones elsewhere...
The text all the way is well written and enjoyable to read. It gives, in addition to the info about each object, some nice (but basic) introduction to astronomy in general - things such as how distance from stars is measured, how light coming from objects is analyzed, astronomy history etc...
However, as it covers the entire universe, it is, as you might think (considering it's size...), pretty basic - both the images and the info. It gives just a small (but good!) taste of everything, not going too deep anywhere.

All in all, it's an excellent book, but I think it'll be worthy to you only if you don't have many other astronomy books, since it's pretty basic.

Although I started out rating this a "4", I changed my mind and gave it a "5", mainly because I found it for half price and also because some of these pictures are so marvelous that it's scary. You've never seen the Eagle or Helix nebulae like this before and some of the pictures within our own solar system give you a good idea of what it must be like if you're out there--scary. Away from Earth and in a desolate zone millions of miles away. Galaxies, star clusters, etc.. are so much more defined than the photographs of these wonders that come from Earth-based observatories. No atmospheric turbulence and also great photos from the greatest scope man has invented. Galileo would marvel at the photographs of Jupiter and its Moons, which he first discovered long ago. He sure didn't see them like this.

This book is based on a great premise. It covers a wide range of scientific ideas that even non-scientists should know. The light touch adds to its charm. However, the proofreading of the illustrations is not good. Several chemical structures were incorrectly drawn, and a few photos had caption errors. This is a serious drawback for a book that seeks to be a reference work. A new, revised edition would be most welcome.

Do I Need To Know This Much About Science? I'm not sure but certainly I need to know something, if only so I don't look like an idiot in front of my school age son. I picked this one up as an addition to our growing reference library after standing and browsing through it in the book store. The information is easy to read and comprehend while not written as if the reader is a science dummy (whcih I am). From Classic Biology, Plant Reproduction and Evolution right through to The Genetic Code and Quantum Mechanics, there literally are 1001 things to read and learn about and the book is very handy as a side car to school science lessons from elementary through high school. It isn't anything I would sit down and read cover to cover, but is constantly used by students around the neighborhood and passed hand to hand by theose in need of homework help.

Reasonably good and handy reference. The guy who wrote it is a physicist by trade, and the weird thing is that a lot of his discussions of that topic are among the most oblique in the book. This quirk aside, and with some reservations on the choice of "important" things to know and some convoluted ways of saying things (look who's talking), this is useful refresher-course stuff.--J.Ruch

In brief, the following book tends back the pro-choice movement with cheap opinionated evidence of science. It attempts to supersede Gods law, and replace it with mans law. Additionally, the book conveys a grave an immoral message to its readers.Contrary to natural law, it states that by petty scientific proof, society can determine whether a fetus is human or not. Obviously, this book chooses to disregard Gods message-"It is immoral to produce HUMAN embyros intended for exploitation as disposable biological material". Not only is it futile to misinterpet the above, but it is simply a crime for pro-murderous writers to generate wimpy, relitivistic propoganda intended to distort the human race.

Morowitz and Trefil (M&T I shall call them), two teachers at Geo Mason Univ started this short monograph as a friend of the court brief for one of the many abortion cases to reach the Supreme Court, so that the justices might have scientifically accurate and factual information to work with in some of their decisions. When Justice O'Connor made her famous statement to the effect that Roe v. Wade was a decision which was being overtaken by scientific advances in neonatology which were making survival of ever more immature infants possible, she did not have available reliable information of the sort M&T have put forth in this small gem of a book. I have been involved in providing abortion in my Ob/Gyn practice for a very long time and have made a serious and ongoing effort to educate both the public and my medical colleagues about the abortion controversy since 1984. One of the most difficult things for the average layperson, and even for physicians, to get a handle on has been exactly why 24 weeks gestational age of the fetus should make such a difference in the abortion debate. M&T have done everyone except for the militant anti-abortion fundamentalists a tremendous service by bringing together most of the scientific knowledge which bears on fetal development as it pertains to the higher functons of the central nervous system and newborn survival. As they state in the introduction to The Facts of Life, while the two sides in the abortion controversy will never admit to the validity of the conclusions drawn by the other side, we should at least have accurate information upon which to draw those conclusions. Morowitz and Trefil had done us a true service by providing much valuable information. wfh

I see that a conservative Christian discovered the book, or this reference to it, and was afraid of what they encountered. Unfortunately for him, or her, this book is valuable precisely because it reveals the gaping fallacies in the antiabortion argument, and how its so-called "natural law" theory falls afoul of empirical verification of embryological development, which they always selectively cite. Pro-choice readers, buy this book!! I

This book was very interlectial and extreamly facinating. I throughly enjoyed readin this book about a scientist that gets lost in the city. My mum,dad,brothers,uncles,aunts also liked this book because I lent it to them all.

Book Report: A Scientist in the City, by James Trefil I picked up this book because the title intrigued me. I found it a well written and layperson-friendly explanation of the technology that makes cities possible and what that technology is likely to enable in the future. Trefil is an author that one feels a connection with quickly-he is a very beguiling storyteller. This book is not about social issues. It is about the materials and building blocks of cities. Trefil discusses materials, such as wood, brick, concrete, steel and glass. He investigates what holds buildings up and what conspires to tear them down. (The real challenge for a modern skyscraper, for example, is not collapse, but wind.) Moving people, energy and information around are city factors he visits at length. Sound boring? Its not. For example, he discusses how most of the glass manufactured in the U.S. today is made by a process called floating. "Glass is melted, then poured onto a pool of molten tin. The glass floats on the metal, hence the name of the process. Near the furnace, the glass is heated from above to keep it fluid, and as a result it flows into a uniform thin sheet. . . This process has the advantage of never having the glass come into contact with rollers, so that it doesn't have to be ground or polished after it comes out of the furnace." I have no earthly idea what I will ever need that information for, but I find it absolutely fascinating. Cool as that part is, Trefil goes on to discuss the future he believes most likely. He foresees that the Edge City pollution problems can be solved by electric cars and better recycling, but the congestion issues will need the information economy to remove the need to commute at all. New suburbs will stretch farther into the country, enabled by high-speed magnetic levitation trains. (Most people, it develops, adhere to the 'Rule of 45'-not commuting longer than 45 minutes.) I find this book thought-provoking, informative, and readable-in-an-airplane. Here are some of excerpts I found interesting: *"The kind of cities we build depend on our understanding of the natural world-what we call science-and on our ability to turn that understanding to our own ends-what we call technology." *"A city is a natural system, and we can study it in the same way we study other natural systems and how they got to be the way they are." He notes that an ecosystem is a place that supports the existence of niches, where energy flows through, where materials tend to move in cycles, and is not static. *"[With respect to plastics] we seem to be filling 10 percent of our dumps with carbon chains taken from deep reservoirs of oil and coal around the world, used briefly, and then reburied." * "I know of no better way to illustrate the essential unity of nature than to note that the amount of traffic the Golden Gate bridge supports and the height reached by the tree outside your window are governed by the same law." * "What good is this device? Mr. Prime Minister, someday you will be able to tax it. (Physicist Michael Faraday, on the first electrical generator)" * "Improving efficiency doesn't produce radical changes in the structure of a society. It just allows people to go on doing what they've been doing all along. It is in . . . the development of new ways of producing energy-that the real potential for change lies." * "In a sense, then, the bedroom suburb filled with people who worked in the central city was a transitory phase in the automobile-driven expansion of American cities. Within a few decades of the time that workers began moving to the suburbs, the jobs moved to be near them. City planners and intellectuals still haven't grasped this fact, nor has the reality of what's going on the outskirts of American cities penetrated the national consciousness. The central feature of what Joel Garreau calls Edge Cities is that a combination of personal mobility (supplied by the automobile) and a new kind of industry (based on information technology and the microchip) has spawned a metropolis characterized by a network of work centers, or nodes, of which the centralized city is only one. In such a system, people live in the development between the nodes and commute to work in them, not necessarily into the central city." * "No sooner had telegraph lines been spread around the world in the late 1800s than what analysts call a killer technology came on the scene. A killer technology is one that completely replaces (kills) an old way of doing things, as cars replaced horse-drawn carriages and transistors replaced vacuum tubes. In this case, the killer technology was the telephone." * "The history of our ability to control matter, energy, and information leads, it seems to me, to an interesting hypothesis: There are no longer any technological limits on the kinds of cities we can build." * "There are two great hurdles to an urban future dominated by the construction of edge cities. One is the pollution associated with the widespread use of automobiles; the other is the congestion resulting from the need for constant traffic between nodes. Both these problems must be dealt with to make this sort of future possible." * "Astronomer Robert Wood and I once calculated that the market value of materials in a single asteroid 10 miles across exceeds the total national debt of the United States. If the asteroids turn out to be an exploitable resource, then the first permanent residents in space may be miners, as were the first Europeans in the American West." Chip Saltsman (chip.saltsman@ey.com)

In his book, E.D. Hirsch makes a good arguement that kids in America are not being taught the basic knowledge that they need in order to function and communicate effectively in our society. The book was published in 1988. Reading it was like hearing a voice crying in the wilderness. I can hear Hirsch's voice speaking louder with each passing year.

This vital information that Hirsch refers to is simply not being taught in schools, at least not enough of them. If you're concerned, ask your child what he's learning in history, science, math, English. Or just flip through the appendix in the back of the book where Hirsch lists his "What Literate Americans Know." Sure, it's not a perfect list, but it is a starting point.

Our culture is rapidly becoming one in which movie stars, professional sports stars, and scandals in the news are the factors that tie us together culturally as a nation. We are rapidly losing the thoughts, ideas, concepts, and lessons from our national culture that really matter. Read 'Cultural Literacy' and see if you agree.

Put this on your To-Read-No-Matter-What list.

Hasn't the popularity of "Dummies" books raised a red flag anywhere? What does that say about the average American reader's view of him/herself? Do we sense that we're educationally lacking?

Too many of America's young people do not have, because they haven't been taught, the knowledge they need to preserve the exceptional way of life they've inherited. They know Harry Potter and West Wing but not the Peloponnesian Wars or who said, "To be or not to be." They are culturally illiterate.

Cultural literacy is the background information we need to know in order to understand and to communicate in our society. Without it we wouldn't understand what a reviewer says when he likens Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman" to "Cinderella" or when a pundit says the environment is a politician's Achilles heel.

"To be culturally literate," Hirsch says, "is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world." Readers must understand the writer's unspoken "systems of associations."

I've taught college-level writing classes and have been astounded to meet students who have never read a book, who don't understand the simplest references to classical literature and who, frankly, don't care.

This ignorance threatens our very existence as a free nation. One of the most important points Hirsch makes is the need for the average citizen to understand enough science to comprehend debates about environmental and political issues. He cites the debate over the Strategic Defense Initiative and says of the voting public, "...their education should have provided them with the general facts and principles needed to understand the terms of the debate -- how a satellite works, what a laser is and can do, and under what conditions such a system would be likely to succeed or fail." He neglects to mention the historical, social and political backgrounds that enter into the debate but his point applies to those as well.

The highest stakes are involved here. The last election was a primary example of the ignorance of the American voter. Many still don't understand what happened and are merrily led down a primrose path of misunderstanding by an equally Constitutionally (as in the US Constitution)uninformed press. Further, and even sadder, they don't bother to find out!

Read CULTURAL LITERACY. Absorb it. Make it your mantra and work to see that the next generation of Americans learns the background of their culture as well as the history, sociology and science they need to protect our way of life at the ballot box.

This book specifies about the need for reading. Many Americans do not read at an everyday basis. Hirsch believes that illiteracy is a dilemma in the United States. Therefore, every American should read this book as it sends a powerful message to people of the United States to be able to get hooked into reading.