Merchant of Venice, The: A COMEDY by William SHAKESPEARE. The most memorable CHARACTER is SHYLOCK, a greedy money lender who demands from the title character "a POUND OF FLESH" as payment for a DEBT.

Another problem is that Hirsch strays from his proposed selection method of avoiding general or expert information. In his chapter on the Conventions of Written English, undoubtedly the worst in the volume, he includes entries like

period: A punctuation mark--.--that ends a DECLARATIVE SENTENCE.

How does that entry help someone who is assumed to at least be able to read the dictionary?

Supposedly, Hirsch weeded out specialized entries by using a formula of selecting only events, people or things that major newspapers would refer to without a definition. (Under that rationale, many of Hirsch's entries are extremely questionable.) The science entries, compiled by Trefil, are exempt from this qualification, since "there is little broad knowledge of science even among educated people." Granted, but does one need to know what thermal inversion is in order to function as a literate member of society? Similarly, would a science major feel a driving need to recognize that John Constable was an artist?

I don't want to quibble too much with Hirsch's choice of entries. (Although I wish W.H. Auden and Charles Schulz's Peanuts had made the list.) I'm not trying to harp on his errors. (Although the good citizens of Tallahassee will be thrilled to note that Jacksonville is listed as the capital of Florida.) But we must be wary of a 600-page list of information with an implicit message that says "You must read me." Perhaps knowledge is power, but is that knowledge confined to the superficial identifications E.D. Hirsch finds important? We should keep in mind another educational truism: "A little learning can be a dangerous thing."