Customer Reviews

Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles

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Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles is really great! It's another excellent book in author Paul Sloane's outstanding lateral thinking puzzles series.
The puzzles in this book truly make you think! They're delightful to solve. It's absolutely addicting. Once you read the first, you can't put the book down till you've tried to solve the rest. In fact, you want another of his lateral thinking books after reading this--which is why we have all that he has written so far! Intriguing and challenging--these lateral thinking puzzles will delight expert puzzle lovers and novices alike.

The definition of a lateral thinking puzzle is one that requires the reader to take an approach that is not literal or direct. For these reasons, high quality lateral thinking puzzles are very good at getting people to "think outside their box" as they search for solutions to difficult and complex problems.
Unfortunately, many of the puzzles in this book are more similar to a riddle or a joke rather than a puzzle. Furthermore, some of the solutions are of the groaner variety. Consider the following set:

Where was Cleopatra's temple?
How many marbles can you put in an empty bag?
If a duck came paddling down the Nile, where would it have come from?
How long will a seven-day grandfather clock run without winding?
Do you know how long cows should be milked?

The answers are:

*) On the side of her forehead
*) One, after that the bag is no longer empty
*) An egg
*) Without winding, it will run for no time at all
*) The same way as short cows.

When she was younger, the joke books that my daughter read contained items similar to these. I am not sure that tales like this fit within the usual lateral thinking puzzle genre and I did not find them particularly challenging or interesting.

"Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles" by Paul Sloane and Des MacHale is a book of puzzles consisting of strange sounding situations drawn from real life. The puzzles have a logical explanation that readers have to figure out. There are four groups of puzzles: Tempting Puzzles; Intriguing Puzzles; Grisly Puzzles; and Diabolical Puzzles. The easiest puzzles are in the Tempting Puzzles section and the Diabolical section has the most difficult puzzles. The grisly puzzles all feature deaths, accidents, or mutilations. After the puzzle section is the clue section, which contains either hints or yes or no questions for each puzzle. After the clue section is the answer section. There are also two WALLY tests (World Association for Laughter, Learning, and Youth) (one easy and the other more difficult) which are trick questions designed to fool readers.

"Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles" was a fun, challenging puzzle book. Although they can be done individually, it's best to do the puzzles with other people since the clues aren't always helpful. Most of the puzzles in the first section, Tempting Puzzles, are very easy, starting with the first puzzle "A Fishy Tale" and including "The Book". However, some of the puzzles are problematic. "Church Bells II" needed more information; "Bill and Ben" was not plausible; and the puzzles "The Missing Brick" and "A Strange Flight" make no sense and should have been left out. Some of the puzzles in the Intriguing Section are also easy, but a couple of them required real lateral thinking and were quite enjoyable ("The Banker", "Bridge Crossing", "The Seven Year Itch" and "An Irish Puzzle"). The puzzles in the Grisly Section seem based more on urban legend than real life, notably "A Shocking Discovery" and "The Dog Choker". The diabolical puzzles are indeed difficult, but some of them are made more difficult because they need more information, especially "Suitcase for Hire" and "The Torn Cheque". Also, the last puzzle, "A Puzzling Attack" isn't as cute as the authors think it is. One particularly frustrating aspect of the book is that the puzzles don't list what page the clues and answers are on, which means lots of rifling through pages to find the clues and answers.

For the most part, "Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles" is a fun puzzle book.

A representative "puzzle" from this book:

"During a wedding reception, the father of the bride found that his wallet was missing. How did he find out who had taken it?"

"Solution" according to this book:

"Two weeks later, when the couple returned from their honeymoon, the whole family sat down to watch the wedding video. They were horrified to see, caught on camera, the groom stealing the father-in-law's wallet."

Really??? Perhaps it's just me, but I fail to see how this "solution" is any better than, say, "the father-in-law saw who took it out of the corner of his eye" or "he asked people, 'Where's my wallet?' and someone told him that the groom took it."

Many of the "puzzles" have similarly inelegant "solutions."