I did want to mention, after Saturday's essay, that my parents did supply our house with a number of reference materials published after 1956. A 16-volume History of the United States published during the Kennedy administration includes only two sentences about American intervention in Indochina, but a lot of well-reproduced pictures from 1492 to 1962. (And one childish scrawl from somebody who felt the need to let me know I was a fag.)
For a while, my dad kept a subscription in my name for a series of soft-cover science books with gummed pictures that you were supposed to put in the appropriate space in each book; with every fourth book, there was a box for them so that they'd look like a series of hard-cover books on the bookshelf.
Then there was the lone volume of another encyclopedia in the mid-1970's -- my parents sent in for the introductory-priced Volume 1, but sent a No Thanks note for the rest. I remember a photo of an impressively-endowed aborigine from Angola or Australia in it, and that if I was free to choose a topic for a report in junior high, I tried to think of something from Aardvark to Australopithecus whenever possible.
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