Michael Rips is the author of Pasquale’s Nose (Back Bay Books, $13), a memoir about his experiences living in a small Etruscan community in Italy.
Encyclopedia Britannica (supplemental volumes, 1926) (out of print). The optimism and brilliance of the 20th century is no more perfectly summarized than in these volumes, including essays by Freud (“Psycho-analysis”), Trotsky (“Lenin”); Bertrand Russell (“Theory of Knowledge”); Einstein (“Space-Time”); Niels Bohr (“The Atom”); Henry Ford (“Mass Production”); Bernard Baruch (“Raw Materials”); Harry Houdini (“Conjuring”); Roscoe Pound (“Legal Education”), Walter Lippmann. … The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, with its six supplemental volumes (three published in 1922 and three more in 1926), is the only book that I cannot imagine being without. Consequently, it has accompanied me across continents. After 1926, the Britannica was completely rewritten; the new text, vulgarized and sanitized, contains little of interest, save Husserl’s essay on phenomenology (originally planned as a collaboration with Martin Heidegger).
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