Product Description

This gargantuan gift book for trivia lovers is packed with lists of nearly everything imaginable: from card games, guns, mental states, and shapes to greetings, mushrooms, citrus fruits, artificial sweeteners, and stars. The casual browser will love this impulse buy for its unexpected treasures—such as the 22 types of animals that camouflage themselves and the 25 highest-scoring Scrabble words. Fact-finders will love it for its practical A-Z format and thorough index.

• Special oversized gift book package
• More than 1,200 lists containing more than 50,000 items
• A great resource for writers, journalists, researchers, and puzzle-solvers
• Alphabetically organized and indexed
• Addictive and fun to browse

Barbara Ann Kipfer is a lexicographer, archaeologist, and the author of more than 25 books, including How it Happens, 4,000 Questions for Getting to Know Anyone and Everyone, 14,000 Things to Be Happy About and The Order of Things.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356551 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Released on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
When I ordered this book, I expected it to be big and packed with interesting, entertaining and obscure information. At 640 pages, it is big, but it is far from being packed with information. The lists are spread out very sparsely and crudely on each page. A typical page holds a mere 116 words instead of the average of 400 or 500 words that a typical book page holds. In the introduction, this book compares itself to Roget's Thesaurus. A typical word count on a page of Roget's Thesaurus is 518 words. At 1316 pages, Roget's Thesaurus gives you 681,688 words, compared to 74,240 words in this book. Roget's Thesaurus has a great index; this book has no index. Roget's Thesaurus (6th Edition) costs $14.93 in hardcover from Amazon; this book costs $16.47 in soft cover. Which is the better buy? The irony is that Roget's Thesaurus is edited by the same editor as this book!

A brief survey of the lists included in this book shows them to be far from comprehensive. Charles de Gaulle complained about how hard it was to govern a country (France) with 265 cheeses. How many cheeses does this book list? A mere 128. The list of 'Disney Characters, First 100' fails to mention Peter Pig, who was Donald Duck's sidekick in his first cartoon appearance in The Little Red Hen. 'Book Types' is missing palimpsest. 'Parasite Types' is woefully inadequate, and is missing obvious ones like the botfly and the Guinea worm. The military is sadly neglected with no lists for basic items such as tanks or landmines. Under 'Parliament Countries', Canada is missed. A list of chess openings and chess champions would have been welcome. 'Pasta Shapes and Types' is missing cavatappi. Etc. Etc. If you want a book that you can study so as to be well prepared for trivia games or contests, this isn't it. Basic lists like the ten highest waterfalls or the ten longest rivers are not there. This book looks like it was thrown together quickly. Not only is it short on information, the information it does provide is presented in a plain, bland manner, not much better than a bunch of words pecked off on an old manual typewriter and arranged in columns of 4.

There are some good things in this book, such as 'Nixon's Enemies List' and 'Snoopy's Siblings', but not nearly enough to make up for its shortcomings. The idea of this book is a good one, but a lot more work needs to be done to make it entertaining, definitive and worth the money it costs.

Not at all what I expected
This book was not what I anticipated. I purchased it as a gift for my trivia-loving dad for Christmas hoping he could spend hours purusing through. Although he could have spent hours as the book is so large, it would have been quite boring for him, I'm afraid. It truly is a book of list after list after list of miscellaneous things. Not a sit down and enjoy reading type of book. No paragraphs or questions or chapters, only pages of lists. I was very disappointed with the lack of description on Amazon about the book from the start.

I find it useful
As an advertising copywriter, I find this book extremely useful. I'm not looking for obscure information. I'm looking for a quick way to find comprehensive lists of items and/or words pertaining to a given subject. This book does just that, and does it well. I'm keeping it alongside my thesaurus and books of quotations as a helpful tool for discovering the intersections of two or more thoughts. As a reference of this kind, I'm giving the book four stars.