Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82345 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

interesting but not amazing
Interesting and worth reading but anyone with 21st century sense already knows most of these. Seems as though the author's could have just cited snopes for all of the information. The photos in the book are lousy. However, there is still enough info in the book to make it worth reading.

Fascinating facts in reader-friendly form!
From the Author's Note all the way through to the last word on page 236, the author's conversational (and charmingly cheeky) commentary on these "hundreds of 'facts' you thought were true, but aren't" is a pleasure to read. Adding this book, Gideon-style, to the bedside tables of hotels around the world, would save thousands of weary travelers from the boredom of channel surfing, enabling them to read something that is not only fun and interesting but educational. Great gift for teens or adults with an appetite for trivia and learning the unexpected.

Amazing, but tepid
Having this book in your library is something that you will enjoying showing your friends and family, but don't take it to seriously. While most of the explanations given in the book are true, many of them are so only if you love to nit pick. For instance, the author states that leaves do not change colors in the fall. What? Everyone knows they do, they see them turn from green, to orange or read or yellow. If that is not a color change, then what is it? True, the leaves are green because of the presence of chlorophyll, which disappears when the leaves die, exposing the true color of the leaf cells, nevertheless, a change from green to red is a color change.

There are other points where the author is correct only because of a nit pick. He claims that the Earthquake of 1906 did not destroy San Francisco, the fire the quake started did. But would the fires have occurred if the earthquake not happened? Saying the fires destroyed the city, not the quake is like saying the knife stab did kill the man, the blood loss did.

Of course, there are times when the author contradicts himself. In one section he disproves there is no "Dark side of the moon", then a few sections later uses the "dark side of the moon" as a physical place in his conclusion.

He even delves into the area of religion when he defends why the myth of the Great Flood and Noah's Ark should be in the Bible. Simply because there was an actual ancient flood does not mean it is the source or should be considered the source of the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible. He fails to make that distinction. Nor does he mention any of the non flood theories for the Biblical myth

For the most part, most of his explanations are correct, but there are more than a few which are only correct to when applying the most anal interpretation of the supposed myth. Yet, it is a reference book most intelligent people will find interesting and somewhat enlightening.