Customer Reviews

Instant Intellectual: The Quick & Easy Guide to Sounding Smart and Cultured

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

 

 

The concept of the book is excellent. The presentation is also very good. But it is pretty lightweight. It does not have enough contents to serve as a reference, nor do I think, after paging through this book, that was what the author had in mind.

I have several books I stuff in the car for light reading while I am waiting for people or traffic. This book belongs there.

Once in a while or so, I like to buy books which may, at first glance, appear to be trivia & yet studded with interesting & entertaining stuff. This is one of those books that I have encountered while browsing through some of my favourite used bookstores.

From years of personal experience, I often noted that such books provide me with useful learning points.

In fact, many of the trivia questions in this particular book gave me some valuable insights into how to rack the human mind.

Let me explain. At the end of my creativity workshops for professional adults (& even for kids & teens), I often like to conduct a ten-minute 'Rack Your Brains' session, during which participants have only 30 seconds to answer each of thirteen hand-picked questions, comprising mostly puzzles, teasers, trivia, etc. My purpose of the exercise is to sum up what I called 'understanding cognitive traps & pattern interrupts'.

On the whole, I find this book to be a reasonably good companion to 'Instant Genius" (which I have reviewed earlier) by Tanya Slover.

A small, square-shaped book. It contains translations to a few "foreign words", such as coup d'etat, etc. It's really nothing special, I suppose most people already know the meaning of these words.