An Incomplete Education
For two months, at least, I've been meaning to compare the new edition of An Incomplete Education, which is billed as "Completely Updated!", with the 1987 original. I finally got round to doing so last night. "Lightly Dusted!" would have been more like it.
An Incomplete Education is a valuable book, whichever edition you can get your hands on. It is crammed with stuff that educated people will have learned and forgotten, or, if they were being clever in school, with stuff that they got out of having to learn in the first place. Judy Jones and William Wilson (responsible for both editions), aided by a few duly-credited friends, have produced a reliable crib sheet that will remind you why "The Idea of Order at Key West" is an Important Poem, and what the numerical value of Planck's Constant is. Memorize the contents of An Incomplete Education, and you will pass for a polymath in all casual settings; you will certainly know more worthwhile things than the people around you. The arts, American and world history, philosophy, religion, and science are all condensed into twelve motley chapters that set out the goods in appealing smorgasbord.
Here, for instance, are the contents of the chapter on Art History:
- Ten Old Master Lists
- The Leonardo/Michelangelo Cribsheet
- Six -isms, one -ijl, and Dada: Your Personal Guide to European Art Movements between 1900 and Hitler
- Twelve Young Turks
- Raiders of the Lost Architecture: A Race-Walker's Guide to the Greek Temple and the Gothic Cathedral
- Real-Estate Investment for the Aesthete
- Snap Judgments.
That's four sections on painting, two on architecture, and one (wryly written by Owen Edwards) on photography. There are black-and-white pictures, photos, diagrams and dates, and plenty of cheeky prose. Of Masaccio, Jones and Wilson write, "Played Elvis Presley to Giotto's Frank Sinatra. That is, Masaccio took his predecessor's 3-D realism and put some meat on it, encouraged it to flex its muscles and swivel its hips, and generally shook the last vestiges of middle ages out of the whole performance. Thus begins the Renaissance..." An Incomplete Education may be no substitute for real learning, but it provides a useful range of pigeonholes, and, of course, an imperishably convenient refresher. It is an idea. bedside book. It is also playing an entirely different ballpark from A. J. Jacobs's. This is no trivia-trove.
But the "Twelve Young Turks" section, a roster beginning with Jackson Pollock and ending with Julian Schnabel, hasn't been touched for the new edition, much less "completely updated." Mr Edwards has added some new material to the photography section, but by and large the Education is not Incomplete in a new way. To be sure, most of the information in An Incomplete Education is "timeless"; there won't be a need anytime soon to rewrite the pages that compare and contrast Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI. Significant emendations do appear through the chapter on political science, and an explanation of AIDS has been inserted at the right place. But the index makes no mention of "The World Trade Center." Perhaps the second edition of An Incomplete Education is slightly premature; it has in any case not rendered its predecessor obsolete. (The chapter on music, moreover, still neglects Johannes Brahms altogether; the opportunity to correct a glaring omission was missed.)
Comments
And end to the bug?
Posted by: R J Keefe | December 13, 2004 02:32 PM
As someone who laments that they used to be smart (I took calculus and physics as electives in high school, even), this sounds like something that I ought to check out. Very intersting indeed.
And yes, your comments work now. ;)
Posted by: Kymberlie R. McGuire | December 13, 2004 02:44 PM