An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't

i was very dissapointed with the information in this book, it was a boring read as well.

This is that rare book that is not merely bad, but despicable. Sadly, it serves as exemplar of the very problem it claims to attack, which according to the glib introduction, is "a world of bits and bytes, of reruns and fast forwards, of information overloads and significant shortfalls."

The authors are too much in love with their own cleverness to provide the curious reader with lucid information, preferring to sabotage clarity with cynicism and loading the text with parenthetical references to pop culture, to the reader, and of course, to the authors themselves.

"Five Composers Whose Names Begin with the Letter P" is a pithy chapter head for bookstore browsing, but should a more complete education really include Poulenc and not Debussy? And if Puccini was lucky enough to have the right initial, why not explain what makes his music perennially popular, rather than making the gratuitous observation that Verdi fans may find him vulgar? Now in its third presumably profitable edition, this book is that most vulgar of accomplishments, the triumph of marketing over content. Puccini's operas, in contrast, are awash in gorgeous melody.

I recently had to move and I lost a couple boxes of books. The first book I thought of was An Incomplete Education. Finding it wasn't lost made my day all by itself.

Chock full of stuff that you shoulda learned in school but didn't. I wasn't interested in it at first, but it was recommended to me by a family member and I'm glad it was. Funny And informative.

This is not a "breezy little book of interesting facts" you will have hours of fun reading. It actually assumes you know a great deal more about the items it intends to teach you than you probably do.

I would say it is as much fun as reading a text book, but in truth, it is as much fun as reading 3,684 text books. Yes, that much fun.