Armed with expert information and a biting wit, mental floss's Condensed Knowledge officially takes the chore out of learning. The book's 15 chapters, covering everything from pop culture to physics, are jam-packed with lucid explanations, intriguing facts, and a smug irreverence you're bound to love. Who else is going to tell you about 3 Major Mistakes on Your World Map, or which 5 Literary Classics Were Written Under the Influence, or which Nobel Prize Should Never Been Awarded, or what the 4 Things Einstein Got Wrong are?
Brush over the titles, flip through the pages, ease into a paragraph of your choice. And an hour later, when your kids are tugging at your pant legs and your spouse is burning dinner, and you're busy wondering just where the time went, you'll realize that learning isn't just easy, it's addictive.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
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... more info
great book:
simply a delight to read. it's great to cram all of these random facts in when you have nothing else to do. even would make a great book for the loo.
Privacy policy: we don't collect information
about visitors except for the standard technical server logs. We don't send unsolicited emails. We don't
sell the information that we don't collect about you to anyone. When you follow
links to other sites, their privacy policies apply. Thanks for visiting!