It is a great feeling of accomplishment to finish a crossword puzzle without consulting encyclopaedias, but sometimes the clues are so abstruse that even the most brilliant are left raking their brains. For times such as this, one needs the third edition of this dictionary within one's reach. It offers myriad facts from a broad spectrum of disciplines, from natural sciences and history to literature and the arts. One of the nicest features of this dictionary is the inclusion of new words and popular culture. For instance, along with finding all the books of the Old and New Testament, one can also find out who directed The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica), where Michael Jackson was born (Gary, Indiana), and who wrote Mildred Pierce (James M. Cain). There are more than 700,000 clue and answer words, with thousands of new entries in this edition. There is a problem with this dictionary, though - it is a bit US-centric. For those solving their crossword puzzles sitting in North America, this book is a good buy. For others, it would be bit of a financial misadventure.

Most people name public speaking as their greatest fear--it outranks even death for that coveted position. If you're like most, your knees turn to water at the prospect of standing before your fellows and giving a speech, but it needn't be that way. Preparation builds confidence, and confidence is all it takes to win over a crowd. The Speaker's Lifetime Library will help you prepare for any speech on any occasion with its four extensive sections: "The Speaker's Reference Guide," "Apt Comparisons," "The Day and Date Book," and "The Special Occasions Book." The first is a collection of more than 150 sets of definitions, quotations, aphorisms, anecdotes, and facts about subjects such as computers, motivation, and youth. ("If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon." --James Russell Lowell) "Apt Comparisons" lists metaphors, symbols, and opposites for almost 1,000 common words; it is followed with a long section detailing great events for each day of the year--even February 29, when the first Playboy Club opened in 1960! The large volume is topped off with speech ideas written for over 50 different occasions. Whether you're opening an art gallery or speaking at your sister's wedding, you'll find the Speaker's Lifetime Library invaluable in shaking the jitters and bringing down the house.

Not many know what a chiasmus is. After coming across the title of this book, it might arouse the curiosity of some. But after reading it, one would know - a chiasmus occurs when the order of words is reversed in parallel expressions. So when John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," he did more than make a famous quote - he indulged in this little-known form of wordplay. This book goes beyond playing around with words - it brings to light thousands of similar quotations: "In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls " (Lenny Bruce); "Is man one of God's blunders, or God one of man's blunders?" (F. Nietzsche); "Love makes time pass, time makes love pass" (Italian Proverb); "The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults" (Peter De Vries). So the author brings out the chiasmus out of the closet of verbal obscurity and moves it into the world of popular parlance. For book and word lovers - you are gonna like this book of words.

Here is yet another book celebrating the millennium more than a year before the second millennium is actually scheduled to come to an end. Ignorance certainly is bliss and nowadays it is a folly to be wise about airing your free and frank thoughts about a basic scientific and arithmetic fact. The days of hundred best this and hundred best that are passe. The thousand-year fad is now in vogue. Keeping with the times is this anachronistic compilation about the 1,000 most important, influential, and intriguing figures of this past "millennium". The selection of 1,000 individuals and their rankings are slightly desultory and overwhelmingly a result of subjective whims despite using five criteria for the rankings: lasting influence, contribution to the world's beauty, effect on contemporaries, singularity, and charisma. Hence, you have a selection and ranking that does not include John F Kennedy, for instance. The authors, who do not seem to care an iota about history in the first place, make tall claims about "teaching" people about history by sparking debates on the relative contributions of individual inventors, soldiers, philosophers, artists and, yes, troublemakers, like Gavrilo Princip, the teenage assassin who touched off World War I. For those uncaring and as callous as the others, this is a good buy - it has a good "millennium" value. For historians and having some respect for history, wait for some historian to rank 1,000 men and women when the millennium actually comes to an end on December 31, 2000.