The Book of General Ignorance | John Mitchinson, John Lloyd

The Book of General Ignorance | John Mitchinson, John Lloyd | Confections for the mind

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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 48 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British bestseller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more,

The Book of General Ignorance is a witty ?gotcha? compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It?ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.

Revealing the truth behind all the things we think we know but don?t, this book leaves you dumbfounded about all the misinformation you?ve managed to collect during your life, and sets you up to win big should you ever be a contestant on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Besides righting the record on common (but wrong) myths like Captain Cook discovering Australia or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, The Book of General Ignorance also gives us the skinny on silly slipups to trot out at dinner parties (Cinderella wore fur, not glass, slippers and chicken tikka masala was invented in Scotland, not India).

Thomas Edison said that we know less than one millionth of one percent about anything: this book makes us wonder if we know even that much.

You?ll be surprised at how much you don?t know! Check out THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:

How long can a chicken live without its head?
About two years.

What do chameleons do?
They don?t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.

Who invented champagne?
Not the French.

How many legs does a centipede have?
Not a hundred.

How many toes has a two-toed sloth?
It?s either six or eight.

How many penises does a European earwig have?
a)Fourteen
b)None at all
c)Two (one for special occasions)
d)Mind your own business

Which animals are the best-endowed of all?
Barnacles. These unassuming modest beasts have the longest penis relative to their size of any creature. They can be seven times longer than their body.

What is a rhino?s horn made from?
A rhinoceros horn is not, as some people think, made out of hair.

Who was the first American president?
Peyton Randolph.

What were George Washington?s false teeth made from?
Mostly hippopotamus.

What was James Bond?s favorite drink?
Not the vodka martini.

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The best I've seen so far

This is probably the best of the many trivia books I've seen. It seems every week there's a new one on the market, and many of them are quite good, but this one stands head and shoulders above the competition. It's by far the most entertaining, funny, and interesting of the many I've seen, and also probably the most informative; I learned more from this book than from any of the others. The story about the "attack" of the rabbits and Napoleon's "defeat" is worth the price of the book by itself. But besides that you get many other fascinating, curious, and just funny and enjoyable stories. I'd give this one six stars if I could just for the pure entertainment value.

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Confections for the mind

I can't resist books like this, full of factoid essays on a wide range of subjects ranging from earwig wee-wees to the density in the asteroid belt. The book is like a box of chocolates. You read one 400-word essay and then another and then another, and the next thing you know you've read the whole book!

A mushroom is the largest living thing (it's almost all underground). The tallest mountain in the world (Mauna Kea, not Mount Everest--you knew that) is mostly underwater. (A fine distinction is made between "tallest" and "highest," but hey we're just having fun here in the spirit of trivial pursuit.) The guillotine of course was not invented in France, and French toast, well, isn't. Most of the earth's oxygen comes from algae, etc.

What Messrs John Lloyd and John Mitchinson do here that many trivial books do not do is elaborate well. For example on the entry about oxygen from algae, they let us know that oil and gas come from ancient algae. (Coal is what comes from ancient swampy forests.) They also mention spirulina, food from cyanobacteria that may one day feed humanity's hungry masses since it "yields twenty times more protein per acre than soya beans." So have another spirulina smoothie. Their entry on where you're most likely to get caught in a hailstorm (the Western Highlands of Kenya) elaborates on the size of hailstones (US record, seven inches in diameter hitting the ground in Aurora, Nebraska at 100 MPH in 2003) and how much damage they cause. But hailstorms can be good. A friend and I got caught in a furious hailstorm lasting maybe twenty minutes a couple months ago in Florida. Result: the car, which was caked with smashed-on insects from a cross country trek, as a result of the hard-driving hail, became as clean as if just out of the carwash! I kid you not.

Most of the juicy info in the book is just delicious, but of course I have a few cautionary notes to share. I like the question/answer format but sometimes, in their effort to surprise, the authors seem to be reaching for it a bit, as in "What's the single largest man-made structure on earth?" Not the Great Pyramid or the Great Wall of China, but the Fresh Kills garbage dump on Staten Island. Or, in "Where's the coolest place in the universe?" A lab in Finland in which a pieced of rhodium was cooled to within a billionth of a degree of above absolute zero. Problem here (aside from fooling us) is, how would they know? Maybe some creatures in the Andromeda Galaxy have cooled rhodium to within a trillionth of a degree above absolute zero.

But I'm nitpicking. A more serious criticism is that some of their information is not exactly accurate. They claim on page 65 that hippos are "strict vegetarians" but anybody who's seen the PBS nature special knows that hippos will muscle the crocs aside on occasion and bite into rotting flesh left on the riverbank. And on pages 105-106 they write that the word "gringos," sometimes used by people south of the border to refer to people north of the border, "is thought to come from the Spanish `griego' (Greek)--hence any foreigner (as in the English `it's all Greek to me')." Actually, "gringo" is a corruption of the words "green grow" ("...the lilacs and so does the rue") lyrics from a popular song sung by Anglos around the campfire at night as they travelled westward in covered wagons during the nineteenth century.

In some cases our clever authors equivocate and seem to have their trivia both ways. On page 19 they write "Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention...," while on page 74 they let us know that Nero (who did NOT fiddle while Rome burned) "also invented ice cream." In answer to the question, "What was the first animal to be domesticated?" they give no clear answer, instead they equivocate between reindeers and dogs around 14,000 years ago. I think most authorities would go with dogs.

Regardless of these minor criticisms, I can recommend "The Book of General Ignorance" as a "betcha can't read just one" sort of fun trivia collection.

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coffee table or toilet reading?

This isn't a bad book to have lying around. Birds that produce milk. The best-endowed animal of all!! (Barnacles!), and many other facts I thought I knew (who is America named after?) Male chickens? Etc. I had no idea...

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

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