Reference & Encyclopedias

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science - Technology

5 stars (This Encylopedia is one for the angels) - There is something almost comical about the thought of reviewing the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It is an amazing work, such a stunning compendium of erudition in such a wide array of difficult and rigorous subjects that the ordinary rules and reasons of writing a review don't really apply to it. Reviewing any other work would function with the assumption that you *had* actually read it; that you were familiar with it; and also that you were implicitly prepared to face intelligent rebuttal with regard to the opinion you offered and the comments you made. However, when it comes to The Encyclopedia, it would require more than ordinary intellectual stamina and range of interests to *read* it for review and the same notion applies to the possibility of rebuttal: if you are enough of an intellectual giant that you can talk intelligently about the sum of what is in The Encyclopedia, then who is there to rebutt you? Who is going to come out of the woodwork and dissaggree with what you have to say about it? No real 'revue' is possible or meaningful when talking about it, but some things can be said about it and nearly all those things are golden. My experience with The Encyclopedia goes back to my days in highschool, more than twenty years ago, when I regularly went to the library between classes and used the encyclopedia to answer the questions that occured to me at random. Back then, The Encyclopedia was a godsend for me, something that had answers to questions to that my teachers didn't have the time to answer. It was a browser's book for me; the kind of text that offered the cross-referenced characteristics of intertwined questions leading to other questions leading to yet other questions that exactly foreshadow the hypertext concepts that run the web today. Article after article pointed toward things that I would later find out more about only in adulthood, long years ...
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