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Plastic Soup? Fullerenes and Buckyballs? Giant Meat Flowers? Talk about useless knowledge, this book is full of it! Resting somewhere between the Guinness Book of World’s Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, comes “All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge,” a lightweight compendium of oddities and curiosities that will alternatively bore you or boggle the mind (depending on the topic) if you’re not careful. In dividing this ‘knowledge’ into three sections (Memory and History, Reason and Science, and Imagination, Poetry and Art), Malesky, an NPR research librarian, has assembled answers to questions you may have never thought to ask. For instance, do you know the difference between i.e. and e.g.? Or when National Dog Bite Prevention Week occurs? Or when Elvis last ‘left the building’? All this as well as zip code trivia, Shakespearian obscurities and the fact that the U.S. Army once used camels in the desert Southwest when horses and mules couldn’t take the heat, are all here for the taking – or leaving. Of course, most people are able to live their lives without worrying about such mundane and trivial matters, but if you need an inventory of some unusual info-morsels before your next cocktail party outing, you may want to bone up on a few of these juicy trivial tidbits. At 206 pages, it shouldn’t take long.

2022-10-16 17:39