Customer Reviews

The Book of Useless Information

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Some of the "facts" cited seem to need fact-checking, particularly in the sciences, where some facts are presented in an incomplete way.

Also, in the quotes section, he quotes Al Gore as saying "I invented the Internet."

In fact, Gore has NEVER said this. It's an easily checked fact, and I'm surprised the authors did NOT check this canard out. You can check out the debunking of the Al Gore "fact" (myth, really) at snopes dot com, or legal minds dot com or any number of other places where honest people took the time to find out the truth.

This one mistake (coupled with other clumsily written "facts" in the book, make me wonder about the correctness of other "facts" they have published, and I haven't even gotten halfway through the book, yet.

Reader--caveat emptor. And now I'm kinda sorry I bought the book.

I love books full of facts. I just hate it when the facts are not true. Sirloin was not named after a king knighted a piece of meat. Mariah Carey did not say that quote about Africa, and Al Gore never dais that he invented the internet. What is the point of this book if you cannot trust it. It also does not contain a bibliography--so you cannot fact check. The best place to check out all of the false facts is at snopes. com.

Wonderful idea, to gather tidbits of trivia and put them in one book. Trouble is, this poorly-written source of light reading not only cites no sources for its offerings of information, but it is so riddled with glaring errors of fact that it is mostly useless as a means of either broadening personal knowledge, or as a reference book.

For example, a very brief scan of its misinformation includes:

Page 60, where Ernest Vincent Wright's 50,000-word novel composed sans the letter "e" is listed as `Gatsby' when in fact the work in question is `Gadsby'. `Gatsby' as we all know is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

On page 165, the book claims that Christianity has 1,000,000,000 followers, and the religion with the next highest number is Islam, with half that many. In fact Christianity has more like 1,400,000,000 adherents, Islam in excess of a billion---and rising.

Page 5 has us reading that in 1812 Theodore Roosevelt completed a speech after being shot in the chest. Roosevelt wasn't even born until 1858!

Page 42 tries to convince us that probable comic strip ADHD sufferer Dennis Mitchell owns a dog known as Gnasher, when as everyone who reads Dennis the Menace knows, his pet is called Ruff.

Am I being too hard on this book? I don't know. Even allowing for typos and the occasional error, this book is undermined by its weaknesses, and I wouldn't recommend it just because you can't be sure you can trust it.

Which is a shame.

Everything in this book fascinating, if useless, and I really enjoyed it except for one overriding problem: THERE IS NO CONTEXT, NO DOCUMENTATION AND NO FOOTNOTES. Too many of the "facts" are unverifiable, urban legend or just plain wrong. Worse, they are mixed in with true bits, and it is impossible to know what's accurate and what's not without checking wikipedia for all the dubious stories. It is a good idea, but it would be a much better book if the authors had given a more complete story and listed their sources.

Very disappointing. I found enough false information in this book that it renders the book useless, unless you like to spend your time searching Google to verify facts (which the author apparently did not care to do.) It took me all of about 20 seconds to verify that Marilyn Monroe did NOT, as the book claims, have six toes on one foot. I guess it could be viewed by some readers as a fun little book, as long as you don't care if the information is true or if you want to do your own verification before passing along any information to others.

This book is full or errors:

Alka seltzer will make seagulls' stomachs explode.
Duck's quack doesn't echo.
Goldfish is the only animal that can see both infrared and ultraviolet light.

It's as if they just compiled everything interesting they'd ever heard with no fact-checking whatsoever.

Very poor.

Full of half-truths, debunked urban legends and just really poor research. After reading the fifth or sixth innacurate semi-truth before hitting page 100, I gave up on the book for anything more than a bathroom reader.

For 25 years, I wrote all the questions for a local (Champaign, IL) TV quiz show for high school students. I quickly learned to double-check and often triple-check my answers before using them on the air. (I did get stung a few times in the beginning: the old chestnut about the Great Wall of China being visible from the moon, etc.)

It looks like no double-checking was done here. Simply put, this book is an embarrassment. The authors present page after page of urban legend and incorrect information. Please, don't astound your friends with any of the "facts" in this book without checking snopes.com first.

The Penguin Press should be ashamed of itself for printing this bookload of misinformation without bothering to verify it.

I thought the book was very interesting until I started to get to "facts" that I knew aren't true. There are also several times in the book that a fact would be listed such as "the heaviest bird in the world is the kori bustard at an average of 31 pounds" followed a few paragraphs later by "the emu is the largest Australian bird at 7 feet". Obviously that would make the emu larger than the kori bustard (I found that the kori bustard is the largest bird able to fly). There are several times the book does this and as one other reviewer stated, the authors needed to check their facts. Once I read "facts" that I knew weren't true, it made me doubt every other statement in the book and made me realize that I had wasted my time.

I love useless fact books. I've read at least 30 of them over the years. They all contain information on subjects I care nothing about, including this one. But this book contains so many "facts" that are just plain wrong (and easily fact checked).

"Toilets in Australia flush counter-clockwise." [ ]
"It's rumored that sucking on a copper penny will cause a breathalyzer to read zero." [ ] At least he said "rumored."

These are from just a few pages.

It seems as though the author has collected hundreds of "facts" off the internet, compiled them into a book a book and convinced a publisher to waste tones of paper producing a hard copy.

There are plenty of better books of useless facts out there.