Customer Reviews

Challenging Lateral Thinking Puzzles

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book holds 91 thought-provoking puzzles. They're separated into several categories for their difficulty, and for each problem there is a series of clues, then the surprising answer. You can tell Paul Sloane put a lot of thought into his puzzles because they're simple but never what you'd guess.

For example, an "easy" question is, "There were six apples in a basket and six girls in the room. Each girl took one apple, yet one apple remained in the basket. How come?" This question alone got me hooked because the problem-solving is so far out! Tell your friends these puzzles and keep them guessing for hours!

I gave this book to my son about a year ago. It has provided hours of fun and good growth in logic. Our whole family has gotten smarter I think by doing these brain teasers.

I would say that only about 15 percent of this book has material that is really useful as lateral-thinking exercises. The rest of it is too vague to be of much use. Useful questions should be specific enough to narrow down a solution by exercising the various methods of lateral thinking. For example, you should be able to come up with a specific solution by considering ways in which your assumptions affect how you understand the question. This book has too many "why did the chicken cross the road?" questions that require you to be psychic in order to get anywhere near the solution or require you to pull some obscure fact out of the clear blue sky.

I picked up this book after completing "Archimedes Bathtub; the Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking" by David Perkins. The book expounded on the benefits of this genre of mind puzzle, and I wanted to check out some of them for myself. I was a bit disappointed in what I found for several reasons; the puzzles were identical to the most common puzzles I had come across (including "There's a man coming home"); many of the same puzzles can be found on any of the multiple lateral thinking websites; and finally many of them were so laden with historical knowledge that the problem was more a test of trivia knowledge than what could be considered a true lateral thinking puzzle.

That being said, the book was well put together with good hints and final answers located far enough from the answer so as to prevent haphazard skipping ahead to answers. Some of the puzzles were quite ingenious, and there were two review 'tests' which allowed you to monitor your progress. It is very clear that the author had spent some time with the puzzles, and the illustrations, while corny, did help to break up what would otherwise be a very short book. While the book was somewhat disappointing in the aforementioned areas, it did succeed in its most basic claim, and for that reason I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn a little bit more about the subject, as I imagine the book to be as good as any available (who knows, I may yet read a second).

If you are already well-versed in lateral thinking puzzles, this might not be the book for you. If you are looking to find out more about them, this is probably as good a place to start as any.

I got this book, along with 3 other Sloane & MacHale lateral thinking puzzle books for Christmas one year. At first it seemed like a sorry excuse for a gift, but as I read this one first, I found that it was a challenging endeavor of the mind. Lateral thinking, it seems, is taking a situation and finding a solution that is not the most obvious, but usually the most logical. That said, this is challenging to say the least. A good book for people who enjoy mind games.