• Title: An Incomplete Education
• Author: Judy Jones and William Wilson
• Genre/Subject: Vade Mecum
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Publication Date: 1987
• Start date: 5/17/24
• Finish date: 5/31/24

Review:

Found this little gem at a used book store some years ago and just got to it now. Glad I did as this was a winner.

Published in 1987 by Jones and Wilson and many other contributors from of all things, Esquire Magazine. I shouldn’t be so surprised by that when I consider that in the 1980s magazines like Esquire, Playboy, GQ were sources of excellent journalism and forward thinking content. And titties. But journalism too.

Essentially this is what is called a vade mecum, or ready reference manual. However it is actually a lot more than a dictionary or almanac. The whole idea behind it is kind of like the For Dummies books, a reference for the rest of us. Or as the authors state, all the things you were supposed to learn in college but probably didn’t. They made it clear though that this is not a book of trivia to make you seem smarter or more pretentious or both.

The book is divided into sections such as art history, economics, philosophy, film criticism, literature and so on. I read it all from cover to cover… but skipped some sections that were 80s specific like world politics which would be classed under history if it were published today. Most of the sections were as relevant today as they were when it first hit the shelves. Proust and Giotto have not changed much in the intervening years, and Hegelian dialectic is every bit as confusing today as it was back in the… always.

Gravity, physics, even the quark were broken down in plain but not dumbed down terms. And that’s not something that you find readily today. In my experience a lot of today’s scientific literature is either trying to be too zany and missing the important details or written for people that already understand the stuff.

How many groats are in a farthing? What’s the difference between Dada and the Bauhaus movement? What is the difference between a sybarite and an epicurean? If I was on a strand, would I get wet or attacked by a cheetah?

So naturally there’s no way I can memorize it all but it is always in easy reach so I can look things up when I need to. And some of the subjects really sparked my interest in finding out more about them.

This was a 600 pager so it took me longer than I normally spend reading a novel or a history. But it was time well spent and this was an excellent piece of scholarship.