Customer Reviews

Useless Knowledge: Answers to Questions You'd Never Think to Ask

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

 

 

This book is a fun collection of obscure "facts", but shouldn't be taken too seriously, as there are errors on almost every page. The Philco Predicta wasn't the first TV set made (it dates from 1958)... Those of us who watched Howdy Doody on NBC in 1950 will be surprised to hear that Captain Kangaroo was the first network TV kid show in 1954... Napoleon certainly didn't appoint Louis Pasteur to a committee to study food preservation for his invasion of Russia in 1812, since Pasteur was born in 1822... Nor is chi a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet.

My favorite entry is the one for the legendary Betsy Ross, alleged not only to have made the first American flag, but to have designed it (!), and to have been born with a full set of teeth in her mouth (!!).

I got a lot of laughs from the book. The "facts" are not always true -- kind of like what you'd expect from a cocktail party flippant sort of reply. Great book for 2 truths and a lie or just for making the reader or other go "I wonder if..." and rush off to look up the information.

This was a gift for my husband who loves "useless knowledge." This book never seemed to captivate him and it sits on a shelf now, unread.

This is a fun little book...I like something I can just pick up & read if I only have a few minutes...open it up anywhere & there are tons of little bits of trivia...pretty useless info, as the title says...but still a fun read.

I like the book but i thought that it was stupid to say immature Napoleon concocted his battle strategies in a sandbox this is still done today we use them alot. Other than that its lives up to its title alot f useless info.

Such an awesome read, I still read it today , when I bought it a year ago! So much interesting facts :)

I picked this book up because I spotted the name of the second author (David Samson) and one of his other books ("Joy of Depression") is one of my favorites. (It's hilarious.) Well, his humor made this one great also. As did the information. I thought I knew who was the first President of the United States. Wrong. Plus now I know which company invented heroin and what other animal on the planet has human fingerprints besides us -- and it's not chimpanzees or gorillas! Thanks to hundreds of fascinating tidbits, it's hard to put this one down. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know lots of really unusual but really fun things too and wants to enjoy reading about it. Dry it isn't!!

The Answers to the questions are wrong!! For Examples - they state the largest lake in the WORLD is Lk. Superior.. Nope, Caspian Sea. (Please look up the word lake!!)

I read this book in about a day ... it just makes you more and more curious