Essential Cultural Knowledge Volume 1

Jim Ciscell is the author of such books as American Slacker and Mommy, Sissy, Baby and Me. During a routine discussion with his children, he discovered that they were unable to answer routine questions about the twentieth century including who recent Presidents in the last thirty or forty years were. Things that he thought people should just 'know' were a mystery to them. Essential Cultural Knowledge is his atempt to answer that gap between what is taught at schools and what it is just naturally assumed that people would 'know.' The first of a planned five volume set. The first volume of Essential Cultural Knowledge attempts to frame the knowledge with a starting point in pop culture. Three of the five chapters deal with Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and Don McLean's American Pie as a jumping off point for teaching history to what may be an otherwise uninterested audience. Additional chapters include 'People You Should Probably Know' and 'The Eccentrics.