The Book of General Ignorance | John Mitchinson, John Lloyd

The Book of General Ignorance | John Mitchinson, John Lloyd | So you think your know it all?

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The Book of Genera...

	The Book of General Ignorance John Mitchinson, John Lloyd Harmony, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Worth reading

I like trivia-type books and this one has subjects that are pretty interesting. Some things we think we know as "fact", we don't.

So you think your know it all?

Excellent book. I received it first as a gift and then gave it as gifts to a bunch of people at Christmas. Makes you think and smile at the same time. Everyone enjoys finding out that most of the data proves there are quite a few Urban legends floating around.

Interesting but...

It's hard to say if this is a factual book, there are no footnotes/endnotes. Overall this book is an easy read and will make you think and at the least you'll learn something you most likely never knew. I'm also quite sure that the authors made a few mistakes throughout this book which is again why footnotes/endnotes would have come in handy. The one mistake I noticed and know for a fact is a mistake is when speaking of the "thumbs up." The authors contend that this is interpreted in Russia as a "rude" sign, on the contrary, a "thumbs up" is given when everything is OK when the thumb is placed between the middle finger and the pointer then it is a rude gesture.

So, you'll be entertained, but I wouldn't go bragging about all the 'facts' you find here.

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Excellent, flawed, insightful, ignorant, pedantic, sanctimoniously smug and fascinating!

I was given a copy of this for my birthday two months ago, and have had it by my bedside ever since. It is by turns excellent, flawed, insightful, ignorant, pedantic, sanctimoniously smug and fascinating!

Once you get past Stephen Fry's cringeworthy introduction; not his best piece of work although admittedly Fry's less-than-best is still better than most, you are left with a series of questions to which the authors anticipate you will guess an answer that they gleefully reveal as "wrong". This has been a staple of pub quizzes and history teachers' trick questions through the ages of course, and consequently all the usual suspects are here; Mauna Kea gets a mention, so does Nelson's "Kismet", the Irishness of the Duke of Wellington, Richard ap Meryk (here as Richard Ameryk) and Antarctica (as the driest place on earth - which depends entirely on whether you regard frozen water as still water or not)

Occasionally, the pedantry rebounds on the authors. They observe there are more tigers in the USA than any other country, which is true because they are commonly seen in zoos and private menageries. But elsewhere they tell us that there are no buffalo in North America, which isn't true at all (I saw one earlier this month in a local safari park). Either zoos count or they don't. Pedantry, to be effective, has to be uniformly applied, And people who claim that coffee beans are not really beans do not understand how language works. A computer mouse isn't a real mouse either.

Occasionally, the book gets caught out by the changing times. At time of writing a chihuahua is back again as the world's smallest dog, and the authors admit that the number of states of matter is an evolving number. This doesn't make what they have to say any less interesting, but it does challenge the book's status as a repository of knowledge.

I think part of the problem is that for most of the book it is spun as a fact booklet. "Everything you think you know is wrong" proclaims the book's cover. In the afterword, the authors claim that actually they don't claim to be quite right: they only want to be interesting. This cranks the pressure up and raises questions about some of the inclusions. Does the revelation that air is mostly nitrogen really belong here? Even the authors recognise that every twelve-year-old knows that.

My favourite gripe is the first question in the book. The authors claim that Henry VIII's annulled marriages cannot be counted and so he had only two wives, not six. It's a great story, but it's flawed. The claim rests entirely on a strict rendering of the term "annulled" in the legal paradigm. At the time Henry was married to any of his six wives, no one would have claimed the lucky girl was not his queen. To do so, indeed, would have been very foolish.

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Mildly diverting

Aimed at people who want to produce factoids at parties or coffee-time especially when flouting conventional wisdom.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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