The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know is a massive volume of
information that every American
may or may not necessarily need to know, but that certainly would hurt. Divided into categories such as The Bible, Mythology and Folklore, Proverbs, Fine Arts, Literature in English, World and American Histories, World and American Politics, World and American Geographies, various social sciences, Business & Economics, and all the general sciences, this dictionary provides capsule-length
information on truly just about everything.
Anyone looking for in depth, exhaustive coverage of any topic contained therein will be disappointed, but after all this is an old-fashioned paper encyclopedia in single volume format so you have to expect only a highlight kind of summary. In fact, the capsule length is appropriate to the overwhelming amount of information covered, such as defining what an operatic aria is or explaining chemical
evolution. Let’s face it, if you really want to know all about chemical evolution, there are better places to go, same with opera.
The true value of encyclopedias such as these, of course, lie in their, well, bathroom-reading use. This is exactly the kind of book you would want to place in your bathroom because what else are you going to be able to read in the two to ten minutes you’ll probably be in there where you can come away finding out such information you didn’t know before as what the Vulgate Bible is or that Lucy is the nickname of the oldest complete skeleton ever found.
Consider this book and others like it a trigger device. You thumb through it, you come across the summarization of the psychological stage known as the oral fixation and you decide you want to delve into Freudian psychology a little bit more. You flip back to the index and find out that that Freud is back there so you go to one of the two pages he’s listed under and you find out that within the summary of Freud there are five capitalized terms you can also go to. Next thing you know you’re on the internet getting more complex information and, hey, maybe you wind up sitting in a chair with a patient on a couch someday.
All because you casually flipped through this book while on the can.