I had a good time reading this book. Not only do you find out interesting facts,but the whys and wherefores.If you like the History Channel you'll love this book.I recommend it.

I found an error right in the first few paragraphs: the authors take the Nepali name of Mt Everest (Sagarmatha) as Tibetan, and the Tibetan name (Chomolungma) as Nepali. This is such a simple, easily verifiable fact (a quick check with Google or Wikipedia would do) that a competent fact-checker would have corrected it right away. It makes one wonder just how cavalier the authors are about facts.

Or logic for that matter. Example: the authors simply assert that "Chop Suey" was originally a local dish of Canton. Based on what? One wonders. The authors cite no evidence except that the fact the name "chop suey" was of Cantonese origin. By the same logic, "Big Mac" would have been originally a local dish of England!

This is not to say that the book is no fun. As usual: caveat lector.

If you know and like the British Quiz Show 'Quite Interesting' then this book is a must. General Ignorance is a regular part of this hilarious panel quiz hosted by Stephen Fry and the book puts together all the suprising information that the panellists forfeit their hard-earned points supplying a common but wrong answer.
If you don't know QI (make your cable TV get it), then it's still a well-written, informative and amusing collection of facts that are quite contrary to those ones known as General Knowledge.
If you think that Edison invented the lightbulb, Henry the VIII had six wives and the tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest you're in the wrong.
Quick, go and read this book before somebody spots you for the bloody ignorant you're really are.

TURNED ME INTO MORE OF A KNOW IT ALL THAN I WAS BEFORE,
GREAT BATHROOM READING!!

This is a thoroughly interesting and fun read. However, awash as I am in my own ignorance, I have detected a few gaffs here and there...such as the authors' claims that a star named Lucy (which allegedly has the heart of a diamond) is precisely located some billions of miles OVER Australia! Anyone with a whit of background in cosmology would recognize that since our Earth is spinning at somewhere around 1,000 mph and is at the same time zipping around the sun at 18 miles a second (give or take a few mps), and that our sun is sailing along its own trajectory, carrying its retinue of orbiting planets, and that the star Lucy is on its own separate orbit through the galaxy, the chance of Lucy being situated over a particular spot on the globe for more than an instant is very, very slim. Factor in the time delay caused by the galactic distance of light years involved and it's obvious that wherever Lucy seems to to us today, it's no longer anywhere near that spot "over Australia" in actuality. So, creeping general ignorance, like entropy, always eventually triumphs...including "expert" books on ignorance, it would seem.

i loved this book!

it's a collection of short (like, 1 page) mini-essays about things we commonly believe to be true, but aren't. each is written as a question. then the correct answer is revealed, with a load of back up and ancillary information.

a few of the snippets weren't interesting. but overall, i kept finding myself thinking, "ok, i'll read just one more... just one more... ok, another... ok, just one more." i also regularly thought, "wow -- that's fascinating. i wonder if i can remember that!" but i have -- even since i finished reading the book -- found myself foisting my knew and robust knowledge onto my wife and other unsuspecting people, when a pertinent subject came up in conversation. i'm sure they now think i am substantially more brilliant. or annoying. maybe both?

like -- did you know that the tallest mountain in the world is NOT everest? everest is the highest, but the tallest (when including the part under water) is mauna kea, the high point on the island of hawaii.

or, that america is not named after amerigo vespucci (as i'd always understood), but richard ameryk, the wealthy bristol merchant who funded john cabot's voyage to what is now canada, in the late 1400s.

think you know who invented the telephone? you're probably wrong.

how many dog years equal one human year? not seven.

what a rhino's horn is made of? not hair.

how we measure earthquakes? not the richter scale.

what color is a panther? trick question: there's no such thing as a panther.

you get the idea. it's a factoid lover's candy story, a belly rub for the "did you know?" dog in you.

Like a lot of other books that claim to contain "100 things we bet you didn't know" or the like, The Book of General Ignorance is only good for paging through. It's certainly not worthy of a thorough reading, since it spans across so many topics, including religion (and many of us aren't religious, deeming the true "facts" already myths), biological life, famous people, and lots of earth science. Not to mention, these topics are scattered throughout, with no sense of order. However unorganized the book was, I did find it interesting that it would be impossible for Rudolph the Reindeer to be a male, since male reindeer lose their antlers before late December.

This book is for fun, but many of the "facts" are wrong or debatable. To correct just one: The universe has not been assumed to be infinite for about 100 years. A very little research would have avoided this erroneous premise.

P.S. Benjamin Franklin made many clever remarks. So why attribute one to him that he didn't make?

This book is really fun to read when friends are over or at family get-togethers. The facts and trivia are really interesting!!! Perfect for giftss!!

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.

some are interesting but most of these facts are boring and irrelivent. save your money and google what you dont know.

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...

I really expected this book to be much more entertaining than it actually is. Maybe it's the way it's put together, I'm not sure. It
s basically just a boring list of facts that you may or may not have known. BORING!

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.

I love, love, love this book! It is very interesting, random, and full of fun, useless knowledge. Great book for your spare time and general knowledge!

this book is great, but I wish it had a few million more pages because it's so interesting.

I often buy books that I have every intention of reading and never quite make it through the first few chapters. But because this book is broken up into some many brief topics, and each is so interesting to read I was amazed to find that I had read through the whole thing within a few days of recieving it.

A lot of the topics are "technicalities" and will appeal to those who delight in proving common knowledge wrong. But I really enjoyed the more obscure information just because it highlighted such interesting information about things I hadnt really considered before. The author does a great job of selecting from a wide range of topics and it wont be hard to find some that interest you (and you cant wait to tell others about) regardless of your personal preferences.

I used some of the information in this book to create an openning quiz when teaching a group of people who like most of us think they already know everything! What an ice breaker.

I purchased this book for my new brother-in-law for Christmas last year. And, apparently i made a perfect choice! he couldn't even focus on opening his other presents b/c he was so interested in what he found in the book and asking everyone in the family "did you know..." questions over and over again! We all felt a bit smarter by the time Christmas was over b/c we had learned so much fascinating information...but, we were also glad the book went to my sister's house so that SHE would have to listen to her husband going on and on with his new found knowledge!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This book is as good as advertised, and I very much enjoyed reading it. Nonetheless, I am compelled to point out three things about it.

First, I am suspicious of any book providing the "last word" on matters scientific and historical that doesn't provide references or a bibliography. So when authors Lloyd and Mitchinson hold forth so deliberately in their enjoyably smarmy way, I was often left wondering, "Can you back that up, please?"

Secondly, the authors sometimes hold up theory as established fact, as with their answer to "Who is America named after?" Though historians agree that this is an unresolved question, one wouldn't know it from their response, which maintains unequivocally and definitively that Welshman Richard Ameryk is the namesake for the Americas.

Lastly, there is a tenuous organization to the book's material. Thus, "What shape is a raindrop?" leads to "What produces most of the world's oxygen?" followed by "What were WWI German army uniforms made from?" (My favorite few pages were the ones that went from bathwater to camels to George Washington.) I see the reader of the Kindle version of this book complains about the e-book's lack of a table of contents... trust me, it wouldn't be useful!

This book is as good as advertised, but I am compelled to point out three things about it.

First, I am suspicious of any book providing the "last word" on matters scientific and historical that doesn't provide references or a bibliography. So when authors Lloyd and Mitchinson hold forth so deliberately in their enjoyably smarmy way, I was often left wondering, "Can you back that up, please?"

Secondly, the authors sometimes hold up theory as established fact, as with their answer to "Who is America named after?" Though historians agree that this is an unresolved question, one wouldn't know it from their response, which maintains unequivocally and definitively that Welshman Richard Ameryk is the namesake for the Americas.

Lastly, there is a tenuous organization to the book's material. Thus, "What shape is a raindrop?" leads to "What produces most of the world's oxygen?" followed by "What were WWI German army uniforms made from?" (My favorite few pages were the ones that went from bathwater to camels to George Washington.) I see the reader of the Kindle version of this book complains about the e-book's lack of a table of contents... trust me, it wouldn't be useful!

Another addition to my collection of books which either correct many of our mistaken notions of how the world really works, or answer those nagging little questions about life, the universe, and all that stuff (with many apologies to the late, great author Douglas Adams). A great, enjoyable, and highly informative book. Keep it in your bathroom for special occassions when you need a short read. If you liked this book, I would also recommend "Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise"(David Feldman), "Don't Know Much About History"(Kenneth C. Davis), and "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things"(Charles Panati), although the latter is sort of dry and reads more like a text book, but highly informative.

Bought this as a gift for my dad. He loves it. He's been reading a little bit each night.

I bought this book as a gift to a college professor and he absolutely loved it. It is quite addictive.

Most of what we have learned has been passed along by either observation or opinion and we seldom take time to examine facts.

Here are the facts concerning many of the assumptions we have made, only because we really were not concerned with the truth of the matter.

This book will not change the outcome of one's life, but it certainly will enhance the flavor of every day living.

We all have a knee-jerk reaction to blurt out answers to questions about what's the biggest, tallest, most dangerous, etc. But like many of the better quiz shows, the answers often require thinking a little more broadly. "When did the last Ice Age end?" The answer is that we are still in it. But you could easily start to answer with when the last ice age that ended was over.

This reminded me of the oral exam I had to earn honors in college. The three professors started off by asking me which peace treaty ended the Hundred Years War. I thought and thought and couldn't think of one. I told them that answer and felt like a fool. It turned out there was no treaty. So beware of the way questions are phrased.

Despite my warning, the authors caught me several times jumping to conclusions about what the question meant, even though I knew the answer to what was intended. That gave me a good laugh at myself.

The better questions were ones that raised issues of contrast: "What's the largest thing a blue whale can swallow?" It's not as large as you might imagine.

I had fun with the book. It was a good time filler for a long, many-stop plane trip. It would also be a fun read for a few minutes before falling to sleep . . . probably giving you something interesting to think about as you doze off.

My only concern was that one of the answers didn't fit my experience . . . the one about which way the water swirls into the drain in the northern and southern hemispheres. I was actually on a ship once that kept going north and south of the equator, and the direction of the swirls shifted with our location relative to the equator. I'm not convinced this answer is right that it's the shape of the basin and drain that counts for the direction of the swirls. I don't remember seeing any swirls in the southern hemisphere that weren't opposite to the ones I've seen in the northern hemisphere.

As a result, I wonder if the answers came from book or Internet research rather than painstaking research. If so, don't bet your last five dollars on any of the more obscure answers. They might be wrong.

But have fun anyway.

I was very pleased with my purchase...the book was in great condition and arrived before the specified date.

Full of fun facts but unfortuneately arranged in a way that makes the information very difficult to use. For example, in the space of a few pages the authors jump from a definition of the height of mountains to the origins of the term "french toast". Very strange in my opinion.

Lots of information packed into a small book. Many notions dispelled by truth. I really enjoyed giving this book as a gift and then having the opportunity to read it and enjoy it.

This book was given to me from a coworker as a Christmas gift. It's categorized under "humor" which I thought was ill-fitting. There are several statements and questions that are a play on semantics perhaps but I wouldn't necessarily call it humor. I happened to enjoy the book very much but I also happen to be an insufferable know-it-all sometimes. This book did open my eyes to some things I didn't know though. Most were simply things that I never really thought about. Having read this book I can now tell people: it was the whip and not the Bell X-1 that first broke the sound barrier; America may NOT named after Amerigo Vespucci after all; and it's possible that Henry the Black (not Magellan) was the first man to circumnavigate the globe.

Some examples of the play on semantics would be what is the TALLEST mountain on earth instead of the HIGHEST? Everyone knows that Everest is the HIGHEST but the TALLEST is Mauna Kea in Hawai'i. It's common knowledge that the Great Wall of China can be seen from SPACE but what is the only man-made object that can be seen from the Moon? The book says that no man-made object can be seen from the moon but my wife argued that, depending on where you're standing, you can see the American flag. She may have a point unless you're a conspiracy theorist and think that the moon landing was a scam. The Great Wall can be seen from a low earth orbit but the moon is simply too far away for the human eye to see the Wall. Another example is the ubiquitous "who was the first American president"? Well, George Washington was the first president of the United States but the first president of America was Peyton Randolph. He was the President of the Continental Congress.

All in all, I have to say that this is a pretty good read. The entries are short enough that the book can serve as a bathroom reader but you can almost read it in a single sitting if you are not prone to information overload. It would make a great gift for that know-it-all friend or relative that we all have . . . unless we happen to be that know-it-all and in that case it makes a great gift unto yourself.

This was for my 12-year-old daughter for Christmas. It looks great and she's been tickled with everything contained within it. I think this was a great deal!

This book is very interesting. It gives a lot of little known facts in a humorous and enjoyable manner. I bought it for my daughter. She teaches Science. She enjoyed it so much; she loaned it to me to read.

I purchased this book for my son who is a trivia nut. He thoroughly enjoyed the information that was shared in the book. The book was designed to correct trivia that has misinformed people and to provide them with the actual correct answers. It quickly became a book for the family as my son kept providing us with surprising facts that he kept discovering. We were all amazed at how misinformed we were!! I recommend it for anyone who is amazed by trivia.

I bought this for my 17-yr.old son who is a real lover of nuggets of knowledge. He said it was a perfect Christmas gift. It's a great coffee table book in the non-traditional sense; you can pick up and begin reading anywhere on any of the interesting and surprising questions. The writing is funny, informative, and the book tempts you to read "just one more". A great book for those who like obscure and not-so-obscure trivia.

This is a fun book with a large amount of trivia written in an easy to digress way. The book's focus is on trying to bust myths, like Macro Polo supposed travels, or whether feminists actually burned their bras. However, a lot of sections digress into interesting and sometimes lengthy run-on discussions of sub-topics, for example, when discussing diamonds, the author goes on to say that the largest diamond ever discovered is above Australia light years away (it's actually a collapsed star made of crystallized carbon, i.e. diamond). This is all done in a humorous way, and in my minds eye, I imagine it's always Stephen Fry speaking for some reason!

I would have given this book 4 stars except that in the Kindle Edition there does not appear to be a Contents page so I deducted one star. Without a Contents Page, I couldn't dive into it randomly or scan for topics of interest. I think that the real book is written to do just that and probably purposely doesn't have a table of contents, but on the Kindle, where every page turn takes a second or two, you can't flick through the book and start reading at random. Instead, I've been plowing through it serially, which is not bad, but I've no idea what other topics might be coming up. Technically, I could type in a random "location" (what the Kindle uses for page numbers) but that's far too techie for me.

Therefore, my recommendation to Amazon, and e-book writers everywhere is, no matter what the "real" book does, include a table of contents. Alternatively, the Kindle should be able to auto-generate one.

I would have given this book 4 stars except that in the Kindle Edition there does not appear to be a Contents page so I deducted one star. Without a Contents Page, I couldn't dive into it randomly or scan for topics of interest. I think that the real book is written to do just that and probably purposely doesn't have a table of contents, but on the Kindle, where every page turn takes a second or two, you can't flick through the book and start reading at random. Instead, I've been ploughing through it serially, which is not bad, but I've no idea what other topics might be coming up. Technically, I could type in a random "location" (what the Kindle uses for page numbers) but that's far too techie for me.

Therefore, my recommendation to Amazon, and ebook writers everywhere is, no matter what the "real" book does, include a table of contents. Alternatively, the Kindle should be able to auto-generate one.

While there are some great "gotcha" facts in here (Amerigo Vespucci did not lend his name to our continent) the vast majority of this book is comprised of semantic trickery and smug dodges. The "tallest" mountain is one that starts several thousand feet below sea level? The largest "man made structure" is Fish Kills Dump? Eskimo don't have hundreds of words for snow? While perhaps technically correct (Everest is the highest, not the tallest, and even its peak isn't farthest from the Earth's core; Fish Kills, while arguably not a structure, has the largest *volume* of any man-made structure; and the Eskimos have only 4 *root* words for snow, though of course they use these to make hundreds more words for snow) these observations are often hardly worth making. This book is an illustration of the difference between being knowledgeable and being a know-it-all. If this seems like the perfect bathroom book, that's only because, well, insert your own blunt comment about why here.

While there are some interesting facts here, it's quite a stretch to say that "everything you know is wrong." Many of the facts are based on splitting hairs (i.e. largest city, coldest place on earth).

If you want interesting trivia presented in a way that's not snarky (and is hysterically funny) I recommend The Know It All by A.J. Jacobs.

My dad is such a trivia and history buff, and this book was a hit for Christmas. It really is a great book for anyone who enjoys learning more.

The British panel game-show "QI" is, I think, the best show on television, even given the sad fact that it *isn't* on television in the US, and could well be runner-up to the fabled "Mystery Science Theater 3000" for the best show in the history of television. That sets a pretty high standard, therefore, for books associated with the series, and "The Book of General Ignorance" by and large stands up to the pressure.

Drawing from the TV program's custom of giving large negative-point penalties to contestants who give answers that "everyone knows" are true but are in fact incorrect, Johns Lloyd and Mitchinson list a bunch of questions that have conventional-wisdom answers (Who invented the theory of relativity? Why is a marathon the distance it is?) or have popular urban legends attached to them (What did Thomas Crapper invent? What man-made objects can be seen from the moon?) and show why "everything you think you know is wrong." Some of their information is debatable (for example, in response to the question "How many states does the USA have?" they answer 46, saying that Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are technically not "states" but commonwealths), but even the most educated reader would probably come away from these pages having learned a few things.

More to the point, she'd also come away entertained. While this book doesn't have the outright comedy of the TV show (granted, it's not meant to), the pedigree is still evident, which puts this a step ahead of much of the raft of "interesting stuff you probably never knew" books out there. Combine this with a series of Cecil Adams books, and I bet the connoisseur of obscure knowledge and shooter-down of urban legends will come out very well armed indeed.

_The Book of General Ignorance_ by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson is a remarkably fun book to read, essentially a collection of questions followed by an essay answer for each one, not organized really into any significant way (though questions dealing with the same subject might follow one another).

This book would be fun for any lovers of trivia and deal often with questions that people think they might know the answer to but really don't. What's the tallest mountain in the world? Think you know right, Mount Everest, at 29,029 feet? Nope, it is Mauna Kea. Though it is a modest 13,799 above sea level, measured from its seabed base to its summit, it is a whopping 33,465 feet in height, almost three-quarters of a mile higher than Mount Everest. What's the driest place in the world? The Sahara right? It is dry alright, getting just one inch of rain a year but it is the third driest place on Earth. The driest in fact is Antarctica, as some areas of the continent have not seen rain for two million years. The second driest is the Atacama Desert in Chile, which averages 0.004 inch of rain a year, and some areas have not seen rain for four hundred years. You have been told that Eskimo is a rude term right, that the preferred term now is Inuit? True, Inuit is the preferred term in Canada, but Alaskan Eskimos are perfectly happy with the name as they "are emphatically not Inuit, a people who live mainly in northern Canada and parts of Greenland." In fact there are many types of Eskimo, of which the Inuit are just one type (the others include the Kalaallit of Greenland and the Yupiget and the Alutiit of Alaska). Think the first turkeys eaten by English-speaking peoples were the Pilgrims? Nope, Turkeys first reached Europe in the 1520s, brought from their native Mexico by Spain and sold throughout Europe by Turkish merchants, by 1585 becoming a Christmas tradition in England. Perhaps you have heard that chop suey is actually an American dish. Not so, according to this book, it is a local dish of southern Canton, where it is called tsap seui, which means "miscellaneous scraps" in Cantonese, brought over by early Chinese immigrants to California. How many states of matter? Three right, solid, liquid, and gas? Nope, more like fifteen, as the list includes such states as plasma, superfluid, degenerate matter, fermionic condensate, Bose-Einstein condensate, and strange matter.

Others questions and answers deal with just plain odd things that I didn't know. Croatia for instance gave the world the necktie, as Hravat is the Croation word for "Croat" and where the word cravat comes from. In the 17th century, Louis XIII of France kept a regiment of Croatian mercenaries during the Thirty Years War who as part of their uniform wore a wide, brightly colored neck cloth by which they became known, a style that was later much copied in Paris. St. Bernard dogs have never, ever carried barrels of brandy around their neck; the myth comes from an 1831 painting by a young English artist named Sir Edwin Landseer, who in his work _Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler_ painted two St. Bernards, one with a miniature brandy barrel around its neck which he added "for interest." _Ursus arctos_ is not the scientific name for the polar bear, it is the name for the brown bear, as ursus is Latin for bear and arctos is Greek for bear. The Arctic, interestingly enough, is named after the bear, not the other way around, as it is "the region of the bear."

I have only one complaint about the book. Though it does include a helpful index, it lacks any mention of sources. Though not presented a serious scholarly work but merely a fun book to read, it might have nice to include some list of references.

This is a gimmick book--but a pleasant one at that. The front jacket matter includes the following comment that lays out the essence of this work: "Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British best-seller." Or, as the author puts it (page xix): "This book is for the people who know they don't know very much. It contains hundreds of things that the average person doesn't know."

Let's get to the book, then. One nice way of giving the reader a sense of what's involved is simply to note some of the questions and answers. Enough to give a taste, not enough to spoil reading the book.

"What speed does light travel at?" (Pages 56-57) It depends. In a vaccum, 186,282 miles per second. In 2000, a team at Harvard University managed to stop light, shining it into a bec (not clear what that is!) of the element rubidium. "Where do most tigers live?" (Pages 66-67) In the United States! These are captive animals. In the wild, numbers are dropping dramatically. "Where do camels come from?" (Pages 93-94) North America. Here's a new one for me (among others): "What Edison invention do English speakers use every day?" (Page 131-132) According to the book (and this is one on me), the word "Hello" was an Edisonian invention.

"What rhymes with orange?" (Pages 208-209) Orange is a dread word for poets. According to this volume, there are two words--Blorenge and Gorringe, both of which are proper nouns.

So, there you are. A lot of fun. I don't pretend to know if all the answers to the questions posed are correct, but it's quite enjoyable to run through the questions and test your knowledge against the answers provided in the book.

This book makes you think, wow that is interesting--or wow I didn't know that. BUT I found it INTERESTING how the book talks about how humans did not come from monkeys, no no. We actually come from an ancestor "that has not been found yet" but "descended from squirrel-like tree-shews." First of all, macro-evolution has NOT been proved. Micro evolution has, but not macro. I was very disappointed when I read this section, having read several sections before it, filling my brain with possible non-facts. However, the book presents all of its information as truth and fact, just not widely known. That is why it's name is The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know is Wrong. However, I do not think we are so ignorant, nor do I think authors should present groundless information as if it were fact. That section is just one example and in my opinion it automatically makes me question the entire book's validity.

This book is just one of those you don't wanna put down... You learn soooo much (might feel like a dummy from time to time!!!) but it's great!!! Since i got it about five people have read it already!!!!

This is a book for two types of people. Those who know. And those who don't know. Theose who know will read it because they would like to be sure that they know everything that they think they know. Those who don't know will read it because they would like to know what it is that they don't know. Got it?

Irrespective of which camp you belong to, I think that most people who enjoy making small talk and conversation OR people interested in trivia, would find this book an enjoyable read. The topics covered are diverse and each "nugget" or "factoid" has been presented in an extremely interesting way. A great way to cover general knowledge with the kids also.

Worth it.

Those who know

Lots of tongue in cheek pap about a lot of subjects you never had questions about before. Fun diatribe.