Product Description

Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British bestseller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more,

The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.

Revealing the truth behind all the things we think we know but don’t, this book leaves you dumbfounded about all the misinformation you’ve managed to collect during your life, and sets you up to win big should you ever be a contestant on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Besides righting the record on common (but wrong) myths like Captain Cook discovering Australia or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, The Book of General Ignorance also gives us the skinny on silly slipups to trot out at dinner parties (Cinderella wore fur, not glass, slippers and chicken tikka masala was invented in Scotland, not India).

Thomas Edison said that we know less than one millionth of one percent about anything: this book makes us wonder if we know even that much.

You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:

How long can a chicken live without its head?
About two years.

What do chameleons do?
They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.

Who invented champagne?
Not the French.

How many legs does a centipede have?
Not a hundred.

How many toes has a two-toed sloth?
It’s either six or eight.

How many penises does a European earwig have?
a)Fourteen
b)None at all
c)Two (one for special occasions)
d)Mind your own business

Which animals are the best-endowed of all?
Barnacles. These unassuming modest beasts have the longest penis relative to their size of any creature. They can be seven times longer than their body.

What is a rhino’s horn made from?
A rhinoceros horn is not, as some people think, made out of hair.

Who was the first American president?
Peyton Randolph.

What were George Washington’s false teeth made from?
Mostly hippopotamus.

What was James Bond’s favorite drink?
Not the vodka martini.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1763 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-07
• Released on: 2007-08-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
If you think you're a trivia expert, British TV men Lloyd (producer of the hit comedy shows Spitting Image and Black Adder) and Mitchinson (writer for Quite Interesting) may disabuse you of the notion that you're a true scholar of random facts-and quickly. Their surprisingly lengthy tome is jam-packed with real answers to a number of less-than-burning questions-camels store fat, not water, in their humps; only five out of every 100,000 paper clips are used to clip papers; the first American president was in fact Peyton Randolph-that you nevertheless may be embarrassed to have completely wrong. Although some of the entries rely on technicality more than actual excavation of obscure fact (Honolulu is technically the world's largest city, despite the fact that 72% of its 2,127 square miles is underwater), these page-length entries prove entertaining and informative, perfect for trivia buffs and know-it-alls; it also makes a fine coffee table conversation piece and a handy resource for prepping clever cocktail party banter.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“Trivia buffs and know-it-alls alike will exult to find so much repeatable wisdom gathered in one place.”
—New York Times

“The Book of General Ignorance won’t make you feel dumb. It’s really a call to be more curious.”
—The Associated Press

“Ignorance may be bliss, but so is learning surprising information.”
—Hartford Courant

“You, too, can banish social awdwardness by having its endless count of facts and factoids at the ready. Or you could just read it and keep what you learned to yourself. Betcha can’t.”
—New York Daily News

“To impress friends with your cleverness, beg, borrow or buy John Lloyd and John Mitchinson’s The Book of General Ignorance, an extraordinary collection of 230 common misperceptions compiled for the BBC panel game QI (Quite Interesting).”
—Financial Times

“This book would make even Edison feel small and silly, for it offers answers to questions you never thought to ask or had no need of asking as you already knew, or thought you knew, the answer.”
—The Economist

“Trivia books, like any kind of mental or physical addiction, are both irresistible and unsatisfying. By the standards of the genre, this one has something approaching the force of revelation. Answering silly questions suddenly seems less important than taking the trouble to ask a few.”
—Melbourne Age

“Eye-watering, eyebrow-raising, terrific . . . moving slightly faster than your brain does, so that you haven’t quite absorbed the full import of one blissful item of trivial information before two or three more come along. Such fine and creative research genuinely deserves to be captured in print.”
—Daily Mail

“This UK bestseller redefines ‘common knowledge’ with factoids that will inform and entertain (or at least liven up your next cocktail party).”
–OK! Magazine

About the Author
JOHN LLOYD is the producer of the hit British comedy shows Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, and Spitting Image.

JOHN MITCHINSON writes for the British television show QI, and drinks in the same pub as John Lloyd.

Customer Reviews

Poorly researched
This book is for fun, but many of the "facts" are wrong or debatable. To correct just one: The universe has not been assumed to be infinite for about 100 years. A very little research would have avoided this erroneous premise.

P.S. Benjamin Franklin made many clever remarks. So why attribute one to him that he didn't make?

Great Book!
This book is really fun to read when friends are over or at family get-togethers. The facts and trivia are really interesting!!! Perfect for giftss!!

Confections for the mind
I can't resist books like this, full of factoid essays on a wide range of subjects ranging from earwig wee-wees to the density in the asteroid belt. The book is like a box of chocolates. You read one 400-word essay and then another and then another, and the next thing you know you've read the whole book!

A mushroom is the largest living thing (it's almost all underground). The tallest mountain in the world (Mauna Kea, not Mount Everest--you knew that) is mostly underwater. (A fine distinction is made between "tallest" and "highest," but hey we're just having fun here in the spirit of trivial pursuit.) The guillotine of course was not invented in France, and French toast, well, isn't. Most of the earth's oxygen comes from algae, etc.

What Messrs John Lloyd and John Mitchinson do here that many trivial books do not do is elaborate well. For example on the entry about oxygen from algae, they let us know that oil and gas come from ancient algae. (Coal is what comes from ancient swampy forests.) They also mention spirulina, food from cyanobacteria that may one day feed humanity's hungry masses since it "yields twenty times more protein per acre than soya beans." So have another spirulina smoothie. Their entry on where you're most likely to get caught in a hailstorm (the Western Highlands of Kenya) elaborates on the size of hailstones (US record, seven inches in diameter hitting the ground in Aurora, Nebraska at 100 MPH in 2003) and how much damage they cause. But hailstorms can be good. A friend and I got caught in a furious hailstorm lasting maybe twenty minutes a couple months ago in Florida. Result: the car, which was caked with smashed-on insects from a cross country trek, as a result of the hard-driving hail, became as clean as if just out of the carwash! I kid you not.

Most of the juicy info in the book is just delicious, but of course I have a few cautionary notes to share. I like the question/answer format but sometimes, in their effort to surprise, the authors seem to be reaching for it a bit, as in "What's the single largest man-made structure on earth?" Not the Great Pyramid or the Great Wall of China, but the Fresh Kills garbage dump on Staten Island. Or, in "Where's the coolest place in the universe?" A lab in Finland in which a pieced of rhodium was cooled to within a billionth of a degree of above absolute zero. Problem here (aside from fooling us) is, how would they know? Maybe some creatures in the Andromeda Galaxy have cooled rhodium to within a trillionth of a degree above absolute zero.

But I'm nitpicking. A more serious criticism is that some of their information is not exactly accurate. They claim on page 65 that hippos are "strict vegetarians" but anybody who's seen the PBS nature special knows that hippos will muscle the crocs aside on occasion and bite into rotting flesh left on the riverbank. And on pages 105-106 they write that the word "gringos," sometimes used by people south of the border to refer to people north of the border, "is thought to come from the Spanish `griego' (Greek)--hence any foreigner (as in the English `it's all Greek to me')." Actually, "gringo" is a corruption of the words "green grow" ("...the lilacs and so does the rue") lyrics from a popular song sung by Anglos around the campfire at night as they travelled westward in covered wagons during the nineteenth century.

In some cases our clever authors equivocate and seem to have their trivia both ways. On page 19 they write "Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention...," while on page 74 they let us know that Nero (who did NOT fiddle while Rome burned) "also invented ice cream." In answer to the question, "What was the first animal to be domesticated?" they give no clear answer, instead they equivocate between reindeers and dogs around 14,000 years ago. I think most authorities would go with dogs.

Regardless of these minor criticisms, I can recommend "The Book of General Ignorance" as a "betcha can't read just one" sort of fun trivia collection.