That Book

by Mitchell Symons

Paper Book, 2003

Status

Available

Call number

031.02

Genres

Collection

Dictionaries,Almanacs, Atlas, Encyclopedias, References

Publication

Bantam Press (2003), 400 pages

Description

Did you know that . . . John Wayne once won the dog Lassie from its owner in a poker game? Hijinks is the only word in the English language with three dotted letters in a row? The shortest war in history, between England and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted only thirty-eight minutes? Want to learn which U.S. president was a descendant of King Edward III? Or which famous people lived to read their own obituaries? Then That Book is the book for you! From history to science to pop culture, here is an irresistible, enlightening, and absolutely addictive treasure trove of fascinating and fun little-known facts that no one needs to know--an indispensable boon to every true lover of trivia and marvelous minutia!

User reviews

LibraryThing member BoPeep

Like Schott's Miscellany, Journo-lists, and the Wallace/Wallechinksy efforts, this is a collection of useful and useless lists. Fun but ultimately pretty pointless.

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LibraryThing member madamejeanie

See, these are the sort of books that I simply adore. Neither one of them were actually "little" except that they were somewhat shorter than regular hard back books. Both had 360+ pages, though, and were chock full of lists of interesting trivia. They reminded me a lot of the Book of Lists series

from back in the 1970s, and covered a lot of the same sorts of things. People who dropped out of school, last words of famous people, men who were 7th sons of 7th sons (Glen Campbell and Perry Como, BTW), what famous people did during WWII, people who have/had a famous mother-in-law, this is the stuff I want to know about. LOL I thought these books were delightful. I had one or the other of them in the bathroom most of the month and when I finished them earlier this week, I went to put them on the shelf and the rest of my family asked me to leave them in there! LOL These both get a 5 for sure.

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LibraryThing member borhap

Mostly useless trivia, but an entertaining and interesting read. Hopefully some things will stick in mind to throw around at cocktail parties :)

LibraryThing member widdersyns

I enjoy trivia. I find a lot of the pop culture stuff in here fairly boring, especially the ones that are formatted like "People who [have a pilot's license/were adopted/were married 8 times]" and then just a long list of names. I actually read the second book first (oops. I've had these books

lying around forever and have read them before, so it's not a big deal. Also it's not as though there's any sort of continuity to worry about), and it improves on this aspect.

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