Customer Reviews

Curious Folks Ask: 162 Real Answers on Amazing Inventions, Fascinating Products, and Medical Mysteries (FT Press Science)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Open the book to any page and you're bound to find a captivating question with a well-written and interesting answer. It's perfect for teachers wanting to add some spice to their lectures...and makes for an excellent gift for the budding genius of the family.

Here's a sampling of the questions:

Is a lightsaber (yes, the Star Wars sword) possible?

Why does my radio crackle with static or some other interference?

Since contact lenses move with your eyes as they move, how are bifocal contact lenses possible?

Why is it so difficult to make a hearing aid that works?

Why do certain electrical cords (those used by fans, in particular) curl over time? Certain others do not.

Why is the adhesiveness of white glues, such as Elmer's, stronger than that of glue sticks?

How come I can use cold water in my washing machine but I have to use hot water in my dishwasher?

Fun stuff!

Seethaler is a Science Writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She holds a B.S. in Biochemistry (University of Toronto), a M.S. in Biology (Yale) and the Ph.D. in Science and Mathematics Education (Univ. of California-Berkeley), thus, readers can be confident that her answers are based upon good data and reliable information sources.

Highly recommended for school, public and college library collections and consideration for gifts to bright, curious and inquisitive individuals of all ages.

R. Neil Scott
Middle Tennessee State University

Can you define geophagy? What about zoopharmacognosy? I couldn't either until reading "Curious Folks Ask." Now I know why my dog sometimes eats dirt and that animals occasionally eat things for pharmacological reasons that are not normally part of their diets.

"Curious Folks Ask" is the book to read by the incurably curious, the hopelessly nescient, and even the pseudo-omniscient in need of humility and reality. The entire book is a collection of questions and answers organized into 8 categories: ingenious inventions, chemical concoctions, body parts, bodily functions, pesky pathogens, assorted ailments, uniquely human, and health nuts.

This reader likes Seethaler's book quite a bit. It's a book that one can read in a few sittings or read sporadically during the day to turn empty minutes into mini science lessons. If one has no interest in a question topic or finds it too difficult, one can skip and move on to the next one. I surprised myself by skipping very few questions, and even gave a cursory read to the "skipped" ones.

Some of Seethaler's answers seem to have been written by a politician. She begins on topic and somehow she disarmingly ends up on a somewhat related but different topic. Her book is so fascinating, however, that these few transgressions are easy to forgive.

In a nut shell, I enjoyed this book, learned from it, and would recommend it.

In the movie Dragnet, Officer Friday's partner asked him a question, and after a very long-winded answer he quipped, "Well, I know one thing for sure." "What's that?" "I'll never ask that question again." That's how I felt sometimes with this book. Quality of the questions aside, I wish they took the advice given to Jimmy Carter after his first debate: Answer the question first, then explain. The answers too often start out with a complete history of the subject before they ever get to an answer. This type of book, I believe, needs to be quicker to the point.

I found the book to contain a list of decent questions but ultimately the answers were lacking. While some contained simple answers that most could understand, I found quite a few answers to be either parially wrong or to be very jargon-filled and unecessarily complex for the target audience of this book. I feel that some more thorough editing and less personal quips in the answers could vastly improve this book.

This isn't the sort of book you read cover to cover - rather like many "100 Things You Didn't Know About" pop-science books, it's great to turn to a random page and learn about something you'd likely never thought about. It's been my casual bedtime reading for a couple of weeks now, and given me quite a few dinner party facts to start conversations (seriously).

Full credit goes to the author for taking some *very* mundane scientific explanations along the way and making them engaging and readable. She doesn't spend much time stretching out the minutiae or laboring over details that most people should have learned at school, and cuts to the chase in a way that should keep both children and adults interested. From lightsabers to glue adhesives and hearing aids to contact lenses, there's something here for everyone - definitely a great coffee table book!

A book like this can give you a nice comfortable feeling--concise answers to unusual questions written in an authoritative tone can quickly wear away your natural curiosity, and you feel like you're receiving a quick education.

But then you come to a subject you know well, and you may notice a minor mistake (such as, I have never seen a radio that used its power cord for AM reception, as Seethaler states; the cord is too short for that, but the power cord is commonly used for _FM_ reception), or something major, like a seemingly biased answer to a controversial subject (dismissing out-of-body experiences as mere brain farts [my simplification of the answer] based on _simulations_ of them via electrical stimulation does a disservice to those who have had experiences that cannot be fully explained that way--and the fact that the next 'question' in the book starts by congratulating the author on the previous answer makes that answer seem all the more biased).

Another reviewer described this book as a good bathroom book. I suppose that's fair. The simpler the 'question' being answered, the more likely the answer is trustworthy. But on complex subjects, don't make this book your one authoritative source.

This is a fun book because you can just pick it up every once and a while and read a chapter on something you like. Several chapters I read have started great conversations with friends. Here's a few:

In California, we require chains for driving in the snow. In New England, chains have been banned for 25 years! What's the deal with that? (I won't spoil it.)

If your body is 98 degrees all the time, why does that temperature feel so hot in the summer?

Did you know it would be possible to make a Light-Sabre?! (Yep!)

Do we really need to take a multi-vitamin? (Nope!)

All in all, this is fun in the way a Readers Digest is fun: short passages that are easy to digest in small doses.

I found that the topics covered here were only mildly interesting and by the end I was reading the questions, but only skimming the answers. I wasn't interested enough in the answers to spend my time reading them.

I'm a curious guy so when I saw this title I decided I should read Curious Folks Ask: 162 Real Answers on Amazing Inventions, Fascinating Products and Medical Mysteries by Sherry Seethaler. What I found out while reading this book is that curious people are apparently much more intelligent than I because the questions that were being answered were questions that I had never even thought. Here are a few of the questions in the book and if it is your thing then this book is a good book for you.

How does a frost-free freezer work?

Since contact lenses move with your eyes as they move, how are bifocal contact lenses possible?

If the Great Pyramid at Giza could be weighed, would it be heavier than every other building in the world?

Baking soda does a remarkable job of neutralizing foul odors. How does it work?

After reading this book I thought two things. The first thing I thought about is my lack of understanding about what I just read. I honestly needed an explanation for some of the explanations in this book. The second thing I thought was all about the length of the answers. Man, they were in depth answers and some time a wee bit too long. Overall this book wasn't for me, but if you are someone who loves to know every detail about things like this, then by all means get this book.

If you like my review I just recently started a blog chronicling my first year with my Kindle. I am providing reviews of the books I have already read (since Christmas) and the ones I will be reading for the rest of this year. Check out my blog. I would love to start conversations and get some suggestions for good books while telling people what I think. Check out my profile for the website.

Sherry Seethaler is a science educator for a university and a science columnist for a newspaper. With "Curious Folks Ask" she has presented the world with a well-researched, science-based book of trivia to answer various questions you have always wondered as well as questions you never thought to ask.

This book covers the following topics:
Chapter 1 - Ingenious inventions
Chapter 2 - Chemical concoctions
Chapter 3 - Body parts
Chapter 4 - Bodily functions
Chapter 5 - Pesky pathogens
Chapter 6 - Assorted ailments
Chapter 7 - Uniquely human
Chapter 8 - Health nuts

Chapters 1 & 2 discuss inventions and scientific explanations of how things work. Chapters 3 through 8 are all about the human body including diseases, evolution, and nutrition. I personally would have preferred much more of the first two chapters about inventions, mechanics, and physics and much less of the later chapters on health and diseases. In the first chapter Seethaler attempts to answer the question of whether a light saber is possible, and she briefly summarizes that topic as written by Michio Kaku in "Physics of the Impossible", a book which I have read and enjoyed. If you are interested in futuristic technology from a physics perspective, I recommend you read that book instead.

"Curious Folks Ask" seems to be very well-researched, but unfortunately Sherry Seethaler provides us with very few of her sources. The book has no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. Occasionally she will mention a specific book. Sometimes she provides the reader with a link to a website such as NASA's page with the current count of known exoplanets or the World Health Organization's page about a certain medical condition. Occasionally she will tell us that Nature or another journal published an article in a certain year but will not provide the title of the article. Sometimes she says "according to the WHO" (or whatever other organization) but does not provide a source. Most frequently she provides no sources at all. This lack of noted sources is the fatal flaw to any book about science, and it is the Achilles' heel of this particular book.

Many trivia books use humor or slang to keep the reader's attention. This is not one of those books. Although it is certainly not a dry, academic tome, Curious Folks Ask is a serious book attempting to answer scientific questions. Consequently there is not much entertainment value beyond the subject matter itself. What is the subject matter like? Generally the author writes between two paragraphs and two pages in response to a given question. This is generally enough to whet one's appetite but not usually enough to genuinely satisfy one's curiosity. And I personally thought there was way too much emphasis on questions of biology, anatomy, and health and not nearly enough about physics, astronomy, technology, and simliar topics.

Overall the formatting of this book is good. The table of contents is hyperlinked, but unfortunately you can only link to chapter headings and not specific topics. At the end there is also a fully linkable index. However there are no notes or bibliography.

Overall this is a decent book. It was an enjoyable and highly informative read answering a lot of questions. But this book does has very obvious flaws and is not nearly as good as it could have been.