Back to Basics: The Education You Wish You'd Had

by Caroline Taggart

Don't know Midas from Oedipus? Wouldn't recognize a concerto from a sonata? Many of us wish that we could fill in the gaps in our education in order to avoid those embarrassing situations when we feel as if we don't know things that others do. In Back to Basics, bestselling author Caroline Taggart will provide readers with the opportunity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

202 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

I was an editor for 30 years before Michael O’Mara Books asked me to write what became I Used to Know That. I think its success took everyone by surprise – it certainly did me – but it led to my writing a lot of other books and finally, after about three years, feeling able to tell people I was an author. It's a nice feeling.

Until recently the book I was most proud of was The Book of London Place Names (Ebury), partly because I am passionate about London and partly because, having written ten or so books before that, I finally felt I was getting the hang of it.

Now I have to confess I’m really excited by my first venture into continuous narrative. For A Slice of Britain: around the country by cake (AA) I travelled the country investigating, writing about and eating cake. From Cornish Saffron Cake to Aberdeen Butteries, I interviewed about 25 people who are baking cakes, biscuits and buns that are unique to their region, part of their heritage – and pretty darned delicious. The Sunday Times reviewed it and described me as ‘engaging, greedy and droll’, which pleased me enormously.

Reviews

[Pieter Bachir · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very basic... Who would have thought? The history chapter sucked and was very anglocentric.

[Randy Daugherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Back to Basics The Education you wished you had, Caroline Taggart takes us back for a refresher course in things we learned or should have learned in school.
She tries to cover all the basics and lend to them a relevance in our everyday life. It is a quick and short read but does well at covering English, Math, History, and Science. As well she gives highlights of Music and others of the so called arts.

This is a quick refresher and reference guide just to shake your memory or to give aid when the kids run up with how do you do this or do you know?

Caroline has written others along this line and I hope to check them out as well.

[Sohail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book is far from good, I'd surely recommend it to some people. Not all of the things written in it are useful, but some are essential to know, and for the people who don't know them, this book is a must read.

[Rhonda Hypolite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely book

I was curious about the kind of things it would contain. It has refreshed my memory of some of the things I learnt back when I was in school. It has also given me a smattering of some topics in a way that was brief ,clear, and concise.

[Anshuman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simple and straight forward and even funny in certain sections.
I would remember Caroline if she would have been a teacher of mine and that is compliment enough.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not very helpful - much more basic than expected.

Also, the history chapter, and in fact the whole book, was extremely anglocentric.

[Keisha Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice refresher on some of the stuff I slept through in school. The history section was unfortunately just as I remember- a list of boring disconnected facts and very Eurocentric-A fact about how Zulu Warrior slaughtered a group of British soldiers but no mention of the deaths 10x that on their side was mentioned.

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice quick refresher of a variety of subjects.

[Hugh Dunnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice idea and interesting enough in parts, but not specific enough in any area to be of any great value, and so general as to be of little use...