Customer Reviews

Improve Your Lateral Thinking: Puzzles To Challenge Your Mind

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I loved this book! It was challenging yet fun. It really makes you think. The questions sound difficult, then when you read the answer, you hit yourself for not thinking of it. I would recommend this book to anyone who has the patience to really sit down and think. It's fun for all ages for any time. From 7 to 70, or from sitting in your living room to in the car during a trip. You'll love this book!

I purchased this book to use as one of my classroom resources for a weekly puzzle with 8th grade language arts students. I write one of the puzzles (generally a condensed version) on the board on Monday, and then give the students all week to ponder the puzzle. On Friday, I draw a winner from the bowl of entries. The winner gets a candy bar of his or her choice.

Besides adding excitement to my classroom, the puzzle presents the students with a mental challenge unlike most of their other intellectual endeavors. So much of what is taught at school is initially unknown to the student; however, the best feature of these puzzles is that the intent of many of them isn't to teach something new, but to make the reader think differently about something that is obvious. Week after week many of my students slap their foreheads on Fridays and proclaim, "Of course!" But, as the year has gone by, I have seen a marked increase in the number of correct responses!

I truly wish I spent a few more minutes looking into the puzzles contained in the book before making my purchase. The puzzles posed are not puzzles at all, but rather the end result of what you would get if you hired 30 first graders to come up with "brain teasers."

Here's an example of what I'm talking about straight from the book:

During a flight from Brazil to London, the pilot told all the passengers to get out of their seats and to stand at the back of the plane. Why did he do this?

The answer is: A passenger sitting near the front had smuggled a poisonous snake onto the plane and it had escaped.


If you think that "puzzle" is bad, all I can say is that they get worse, much worse.

This would only be mildly amusing if I were back in college and wanted to entertain those who were drunk. Even then, probably not.

Save your money for something that involves actually using your "brain". Purchase this only if you need something to reach the temperature of 451.

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.