Product Description

Loaded with meaty trivia and tasty, bite-sized facts!

mental_floss is proud to offer a delicious, hearty helping of brain-food that's sure to fire up your neurons and tantalize your synapses. Condensed Knowledge is a mouthwatering mix of intriguing facts, lucid explanations, and mind-blowing theories that will satisfy even the hungriest mind!

Ingredients include:

5 tiny nations that get no respect • 4 civilizations nobody remembers • 5 classics written under the influence • 4 things your boss has in common with slime mold • 3 schools of thought that will impress the opposite sex • 4 things Einstein got wrong • 5 classical tunes you know from the movies • 3 famous studies that would be illegal today • 2 religious mysteries solved by chemistry • 5 scandals that rocked art, and much more ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5430 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

Review
"A delightfully eccentric and eclectic new magazine." -- Washington Post

"A lot like that professor of your who peppered his tests with raunchy jokes: it makes learning fun." -- Newsweek

"An ideal reference to settle arguments or jog your memory." -- Calgary Herald

"For the discerning intellect, Mental Floss cleans out the cobwebs." -- Chicago Tribune

"Part scholarly journal, part Spy magazine protégé." -- Charlotte Observer

"The titans of trivia." -- Newsweek

Customer Reviews

Entertaining trivia
If you like cocktail party nuggets of knowledge, then you'll enjoy this compendium. Each chapter contains an array of quirky topics, and each has a few paragraphs on the subject, which might be about odd subjects such as religions with supernatural females, or how certain emperors met their fate. It is the light hearted kind of tome you can pick up and put down repeatedly, and each time find something new.

I'm not as dumb as I thought... or maybe I am.
Great book, which I suspected before I bought it. I was thrilled to find a topic I already had done quite a bit of research on and had also bored my family and friends to tears with... "Rock Stars who Died at 27" (might not be right on title, but you get my drift). I was so thrilled to see that I wasn't the only one expounding on it! Other than that, so much information, so interesting... well done.

Fun book, and informative, too
There seems to be a trend over the last 10 years of books that try to make academic subjects more enjoyable and interesting--series such as the Idiot's and Dummies books, for example--which are often well done despite their light-hearted approach. This book seems to follow in their footsteps. Sure, it sometimes glosses over the subject matter, and doesn't go into a lot of technical detail, but if you consider that after reading one of the chapters in this book on, say, general science, history, or literature, the average person will probably know more than they remember from that college course of many years ago, these books do perform a useful service.

Of course, the pundits can always claim that they're just dumbing down their subject, but on the other hand, what better way to get the current semi-literate generation raised on MTV and video games to actually read something worthwhile for a change?

At this point I might fall into that category myself. :-) I was one of the "grinds," who studied sedulously and diligently while the other students were goofing off or partying, but what with the ravages of age and memory, much of that learning had been forgotten. When I read the chapter on art history, for example, I learned some new things, and many things that I had forgotten came back. Funny how powerful the principle of multiple association is, and memory psychologists have of course studied this in detail. But for me reading this book not only gave me some new insights but brought back so much that I had forgotten. So for me it was truly a little trip down "memory lane."

You'll find all the usual academic subjects here, as well as juicy tidbits and trivia such as "rock stars that died at 27." Sometimes the choice of a topic just seems to come from left field, such as in "The Ceremony of the Bambara People," in the Theater chapter, but it's all fun and you still learn a lot. (Oddly enough, my father, who was an amateur collecter of Africa art, had a Bambara antelope sculpture in his collection).

The book is well written and is just chock full of fun information, trivia, and facts. It's a fun, enjoyable, and even seductive little romp through many fields of learning, and gets points for performing a useful educational service. If people in this country just knew what was in this book they'd be a lot better off than they are now.