The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong

Who invented champagne? What did Robert Bunsen invent? What color is a panther? If you think you know all these, think again. Based on the amazing trivia show QI, this book has answers to these and many other oft cited trivia about science, history, technology and popular culture. Readable in easy to digest chapters, it's a great companion for either a toilet visit, impressing your spouse and in laws of just getting a bit smarter than yesterday

Something for everyone; learn something new.

Mind expanding

Fun stuff for random idle moments.

A funny, enlightening book about facts you thought you knew but it turns out you really don't. I've only ever watched QI a few times but thought this was a much better way to get all the information. On to volume 2!

Perfect book for bathroom reading as you can dip in and out. A dangerous book in the hands of a ten year old, who will delight at coming out with random snippets of information, much to the general confusion of those around them.

Enjoyable read. The myth debunking is generally very interesting. In some instances it is less than solid because it relies on a semantic slight of hand, but it is so well written than one forgives the authors gladly.

A cheeky collection of trivia presented in a gotcha manner.For example, what's the tallest mountain in the world?No, not Everest. It's Mauna Kea in Hawaii. It's only 13,799 feet above sea level, but 33,465 feet when measured from the seabed. "Highest" means measured from sea level to summit, but tallest means measured from the top to the bottom. Each entry goes on to discuss more trivia and information about the topic. As you might suspect, some are more amusing than others.

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in the truth. The book corrects many myths, some interesting, some not so much. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history.

This book can blow your mind. There are a lot of questions that I felt completely sure I knew the answer to, only to be completely flummoxed to find out I was wrong. You may not be interested in all the facts in this book, but I do feel there's quite a bit here for just about anybody. Definitely a fun and entertaning read, that'll also make you feel that much smarter for having read it.

Not by Mr Stephen Fry at all (as advertised at the time of publication), although he does provide an introduction. If we kept books in the loo, this would be the book we kept in there. But we don't. So it isn't. (Maybe we should?)

Great light read. It really reminds you how much you don't know. I think it reads as if it were written by the narrator of the Hitchhiker's Guide movie.

I find this book hard to review. I like all of the bits of it, but not the overall impression.There are hundreds of little facts, presented in a QI style, funny, gentle, interesting and well-researched. This is all good. Except there are hundreds of little facts and they're too bitty to be really engaging.If you have a job that has moments of quiet and moments of being busy, then it's probably great for you, but I found sitting down to read it like I'd read a normal book an oddly unsatisfying experience overall.

Fact-finding websites such as Snopes help us sort out heresay, folk lore, and plain fiction from the truth. The Book of General Ignorance weaves a path through myths, some well-known, others not, sometimes with tenuous segues. It's a short, but fun and interesting.

Slightly better than some of these "isn't it curious"-type books but not a lot. Facts are often stretched to make an interesting story and it reads like something written by journalists. Amusing as a bedtime book in very small doses.

A wonderful collection of little known facts, or correcting "general ignorance" or just plain wrong information people have about a very wide range of subjects.

One of the best typeset books I have ever seen. Definitely the best typeset book I was ever given by the person who did the actual typesetting. Thanks Paula.If you like the tv series you will probably like the book - they are pretty much identical.The main advantage of the book over the tv series is that you don't have to wait until late at night for your fix of the strange and interesting.Think you know how many nostrils you have? Think again.A good laugh.

A book to dip in and out of for funny snippets, interesting stories and making yourself feel dumb.

I think I'm going to have to make myself a "random trivia" shelf or something, because I've been quite enjoying this sort of book lately. This is the best of its type that I've read (or actually, listened to. I listened to the audiobook via Scribd). I'm a big QI fan, so I felt secure that this book was well-researched (unlike some trivia books where I occasionally doubt some of the facts that I read).

Ok, some of these anecdotes are actually set-ups, which only are wrong from a certain nit-picky angle. But mostly they're actually stuff we should better understand. The book isn't just quick facts to study for trivia games - it's an interesting and accessible 'reeducation' (as it says in the description). So far I've not had too many big surprises, but then, I already like trivia games and non-fiction books.

Ok, done. Nothing to add, except, yes, I will be looking for more in the 'series.'

Lots of interesting factoids; I did know a lot of these while some surprised and others made me openly wonder what their source was for their statements. Which is a bit of a problem as they do not list their sources.Still, any book where you can open to a random page and find out that European earwigs carry around a spare penis in case of an emergency, cannot help but amuse.

I wasn't sure on what to expect from this book, but I couldn't wait to read it and find out.It is a book of answers to questions we all think we know the answer to:How invented the telephone?Who invented champagne?What does the moon smell like?What is the number of the beast?Who was the first American President?To most of these questions, I was so sure I knew the answer, but I was surprisingly so wrong. It was an interesting read. I feel I shouldn't have read this book the way that I did. It would have been better if I read it in between reading other books. It makes for a great bathroom, and travel book, It is a light and quick read with all the questions and answers never being longer than two pages.My husband wasn't all that impressed interrupting him all the time and asking "Did you know...?". I didn't find it all that humorous, but it was "tee hee" funny in some places. I was amazing on how wrong I was about most of the answers. The book has left me more confused. What am I suppose to believe now? There were no references to where most of the facts came from. Some things are so unbelievable.I would have rated it higher if there was more documentation on where they got their facts.I would still recommend this book if you like trivia, history, general knowledge and/or you think you know the answers to most things. :)

This is a really interesting book. In my experience, there aren't many such general Q&A books that are fully accurate. I haven’t found this book to be so either, but it was the best of its kind that I've come across. Of course, I haven’t checked all the information in it, but I did try to check the most surprising answers. Here are some of the most interesting facts I’ve gleaned from this book:Contrary to what I had assumed, not all of Antarctica is covered with snow and ice. There are areas there called the Dry Valleys which haven’t seen any precipitation whatsoever for 2 million years, due to winds reaching 200 mph which evaporate all moisture from the air. NASA tested their equipment for a Mars probe there. All the plague epidemics that came to Europe from Asia started with a Mongolian species of marmots which is particularly susceptible to this bacteria. They give the disease to fleas which give it to rats which give it to humans. Actually, just a year ago there was a case of a Chinese road construction worker who shot, cooked and ate a marmot, soon felt ill and was rushed to the hospital where he died from plague – not being a local he didn’t know about the dangers of marmots. What most surprised me is that apparently nobody there is calling for the wholesale extermination of marmots. Here, in the US, the far more harmless wolves, coyotes and black bears are treated like public enemies, and in China and Mongolia apparently people are content just to try to be careful with the animals that can give them the plague! The first steam engine in the world was invented by an Alexandrian called Heron or Hero in 62 CE. His contemporaries viewed it as an amusing, but useless novelty. (He also discovered the formulas to calculate the area of a triangle and other 2- and 3-dimensional figures). The telephone was apparently invented by an Italian-American Antonio Meucci in 1860. He couldn’t afford to pay for a definitive patent and filed a one-year renewable notice of an impending patent, but later on, badly injured when a ferry’s boiler exploded and living on charity, he couldn’t afford even to renew that. He sent sketches and working models to the Western Union telegraph company, but didn’t get a response from them and was later told that they had been lost. When Bell, who had shared a laboratory with him, filed a patent for a telephone, Meucci sued, and fraud charges were initiated against Bell, but then Meucci died and the lawsuit was dropped. In 2002 a vote in the US House of Representatives declared Meucci the inventor of the telephone. (However, this book says that the vote took place in 2004, and implies that Bell worked in the Western Union lab where Meucci sent his documents and from where they “mysteriously disappeared.”) Penicillin was first discovered by a French army doctor Ernest Duchesne in 1897. He saw Arab stable boys deliberately trying to cultivate mold on saddles, and they explained that it helps cure horses’ sores. Duchesne conducted research, identified the mold as Penicillum glaucum, and used it to cure typhoid in guinea pigs and kill colonies of E.coli. He wrote a report to Institut Pasteur which ignored it (Pasteur himself had died 2 years previously). Military duties prevented Duchesne from promoting his discoveries more vigorously, and then he died at 28 from tuberculosis – an illness later cured with antibiotics! When Alexander Fleming had rediscovered penicillin in 1928, his findings were also ignored till World War II started, and the pressing need for antibacterial drugs prompted Ernst Chain and Howard Florey to work to isolate the active compound within the mold (which Fleming had been unable to do). Production of penicillin began in 1942; in 1945 Fleming, Chain and Florey received the Nobel Prize. In 1949 Duchesne was honored posthumously, but remained in obscurity. There are 3,000-4,700 tigers in India and 12,000 tigers kept as private pets in the USA, with 4,000 living in captivity in Texas alone (both in zoos and as pets), and 500 tigers, lions and other big cats “in private ownership” just in the Houston area. Apparently, the success of zoo and circus breeding programs has brought the price of tigers down to $1,000 per cub which has placed them within reach of an average American pet owner! Only 17 states don’t allow private ownership of tigers. But on the bright side of things, if tigers become extinct in the wild (as the authors expect they will), there’ll be enough stock in the US to restore them to the jungles once/if people wise up. And speaking of humans’ impact on the planet, the single largest man-made structure is now a rubbish dump in Staten Island, NY, which trumps by volume the Great Wall of China and at its peak was higher than the Statue of Liberty by more than 80 feet. It was closed in 2001 and is “being flattened and landscaped into parkland and a wildlife facility.” (The dump’s area is 4.6 square miles, and it’s called Fresh Kills, after the Dutch word kil for “small river.”)In ecological good news, it looks like cotton clothes may be replaced by nettle ones in the not-so-far future. Nettles don’t require the massive watering that cotton does and can grow in any climate and without pesticides. Apparently, nettles were widely used to make cloth in Europe before the 16th century, when they were eclipsed by cotton because cotton was easier to harvest and spin, but today’s technology has evolved enough to make fibers from nettles without too much trouble. If some species of ribbon worms get fragmented into small pieces, each piece becomes a new worm, and a species of freshwater flatworm regenerates into two full-sized worms if split lengthwise or crosswise. And speaking of curious methods of reproduction, I knew that hens can lay eggs without roosters, albeit unfertilized eggs from which no chicks will emerge, but now I’ve learnt that there are turkeys which lay eggs and have chicks without males. Apparently, usually unfertilized eggs have only half the chromosomes (from the mother) and don’t develop into chicks, but in some turkeys the chromosomes in such a case sometimes double themselves, and then a chick does develop. Turkeys which have such a proclivity have been bred to the point that it has become their stable characteristic. The resulting chicks are only half-clones of their mothers, because they’ve only got a half of their mothers’ genes (multiplied by two). In fact, they are all (infertile) males, because in turkeys it’s the males who have the same gender chromosomes (ZZ).The authors of this book also claim that the first modern Olympics took place in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, in 1850, under the initiative of a surgeon William Penny Brookes, and quickly attracted athletes from all over the country. In 1865, Brookes helped establish the National Olympian Association which held its first Olympic Games in 1866 at the Crystal Palace in London, but his attempts to organize an international Olympian Festival in Athens in 1881 failed. In 1889, he invited Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the organizer of an International Congress on Physical Education, to see the Games in Much Wenlock and thus inspired him to start a global Olympic movement. Much of this is confirmed in the 2010 edition of Britannica and elsewhere, although in 1859 the first international Olympic Games were held in Athens, while all the Games organized by Brookes were of national character. (The 1896 Athens Olympics was the first one organized by IOC, and thus the first official one.) Lloyd and Mitchinson further maintain that America was really named after Richard Ameryck from Bristol who was the chief investor of John Cabot’s second transatlantic voyage because there’s a reference to the continent in the Bristol calendar of that year where the name America was first used; no copies of this calendar survived, but “there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents.” However, there’s no bibliography in this book, and personally I couldn’t find any confirmation of this. So whether Martin Waldseemüller was mistaken in attributing the name to Vespucci on his map – the first one ever to use it – remains to be seen. They also write that Aristarchus of Samos, born in 310 BCE, was the first person to embrace the heliocentric system, which he did, and that “he also calculated the relative sizes and distances of the earth, moon, and sun,” which he also did, except that his calculations were (very) incorrect, which they don’t mention. There’s also a curious statement in this book that “the fumes from your car’s exhaust (when combined with sunlight) create far more ozone than anything on the beach.” I didn’t know what to make of this, since all the references to car exhaust and ozone I could find on the Internet implied the opposite relationship, as one would expect. They also claim that the Theory of Relativity was discovered by Galileo rather than Einstein, without offering any evidence, aside form the fact that Galileo was a proponent of heliocentric system. And they say that Henry VIII didn't really have 6 wives because he annulled his marriages with some of them instead of divorcing them, which means that from the legal point of view these marriages never happened, rather than that they were terminated, but that's just splitting hairs, in my opinion. Still, inaccuracies in this book seem to be rare, and I did learn lots of interesting information from it which I wouldn’t have been likely to find out otherwise.