Useless Indeed

It's not often that I feel so angry at a book that I recommend against its purchase. I've been disgusted, irritated, outraged, angered but that's what books are supposed to do.

But now I find myself in the position of telling people, "Don't ... just don't buy this book."

What's really irritating is that it is such a lightweight and essentially meaningless book. It is a book that is too minor to have angered me as profoundly as it has.

The tome in question is "The Book of Useless Information" written by Noel Botham and published by Perigee (a division of Penguin.

I have a voracious appetite for oddities. That is why I was attracted to the book, which is presented as a compendium of useless facts.

As I started to read, I was pleased with the quirky and humorous presentation. I was particularly amused by the fact that Sheryl Crow lost her two front teeth in a stage accident and Samuel Beckett's presentation of a play called "Breath" which was 30 seconds long and had no actors or dialog bracketed the statement that "Michael Jackson is black".

But then I started to run into problems. One or two factual failures would have been a forgivable neglect, but when I started running into egregious failures as in the explanation of the 'rule of thumb' being the result of a law forbidding men from beating their wives with a stick that was thicker than their thumb (totally discountable folk etymology), or the durable myth of the the Chevy Nova's unsalability in Hispanic countries because 'no va' means 'doesn't go' (it means the same thing in Spanish as it does in English).

But there were dozens of the falsities, retreads of debunked myths, and they were mixed in with everything else.

When I read that the eggplant was a member of the thistle family, I closed the book. A simple Wikipedia confirmation would have shown that the eggplant, like the tomato, bell pepper, etc. is a member of the nightshade family, not the thistles.

When a book purports to be factual, there ought to be at least a modicum of fact checking. I know have to discount everything I've read in it as possibly wrong. It doesn't matter that some of it may be correct, I have no way of knowing what is and isn't and I'm not going to do Mr. Botham's work for him.

It was a waste of money, time, and brain activity. I read a third of the book and I got out of it was this irritable article.