Oxford One-Volume Illustrated Encyclopedia

This encyclopedia is fantastic. Even though it has around 750 pages, it lies flat at any page. Every page has one or more color drawings, photos, maps, and/or diagrams. I bought this book b/c I'm a freelance educational writer, and I frequently need short bits of factual info. to use in creating exercises for students and lessons. This is perfect for that use. Also, do you remember the Friends episode in which Joey buys the "V" encyclopedia but can't afford the whole set, so he only knows about things that start with "V"? Well, THIS is the book he needed: it covers A-Z, and it costs less! If you like facts and trivia or if you have little "holes" where you're supposed to know something, you'll love this book. It's worth the money.

This is a beautiful one-volume encyclopedia for children (grades 4 and up) and their parents. Its coverage is probably not as extensive as the one-volume Cambridge Encyclopedia or Columbia Encyclopedia; but the Family Encyclopedia is a much more attractive reference book for younger readers because of its clean layout, its easy-to-read typeface (on bright white paper), and especially its numerous color illustrations, including faithful reproductions of Madonna, Clint Eastwood, etc. Definitely recommended.

At 768 pages and crammed with colorful maps and illustrations, the ÒFamily EncyclopediaÓ offers snippets of information in more than 13,000 entires in a format that is ideal for a home office. Call it a super-dictionary, the format is ideal for those of us of which to put to rest a particularly pesky questionable bit of trivia but without access to a set of encyclopedias. The "Family Encylopedia" can supply answers to a host of questions. It shows a diagram of how a Digital Audio Tape records sound, reveals Joan Crawford's real name (Lucille Fay le Sueur), and describes the properties of rudidium (which, as we all remember from high school chemistry, is the silver-white metallic element of the alkali metals).