QI: The Book of General Ignorance

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Homepage: http://www.qi.com/book/
See Also: http://www.amazon.co.uk/QI-General-Ignorance-Stephen-Fry/

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Reviews (1)

Filled Star - Denotes One PointFilled Star - Denotes One PointFilled Star - Denotes One PointEmpty Star - Denotes No PointEmpty Star - Denotes No Point by martinp on 14 Jan 2007

This book is a spin-off from the BBC TV game show QI, and collects lots of obscure facts from the programme in a series of short essays. It's nowhere near as fun as the programme, because you don't hear the facts read out in Stephen Fry's voice or commented on by the studio guests, but there are some really interesting things here to be learned and a lot of urban legends that one can unlearn. For example, Edison invented the greeting "Hello", but Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned because the fiddle wasn't invented for another thousand years.

The book's aim is not only to give you some quite interesting knowledge, but to "make you feel small and silly" by arguing that since so much of what "everybody knows" is wrong, nobody, not even experts, knows anything much. The book is a let-down in this respect. For one thing, a lot of its points are *technicalities*. For example, the cover of the book says "If you think the earth has only one moon... you need this book urgently" but read the relevant chapter and you see that the earth really does only have one moon. "Over a billion people have been killed by marmots": only in the sense that marmots have played a role in communicating disease to other animals, who then gave it to humans. "Astoundingly, light is invisible": yes, but only in a sort of semantic sense in which sound waves cannot be heard. There are lots more examples.

Despite the impression given by the book cover and Amazon listing, the book was not written by Stephen Fry but by John Lloyd (the inventor of QI) and John Mitchison. John Lloyd's introduction gives a list of phenomena including viruses and electricity, saying that "nobody has the faintest notion" of what they really are. This is just bluntly misleading given all the science has found out about those things.

One more comment is that in a book that's concerned with giving definitive factual answers to all sorts of questions, it's unforgivable to make almost no mention of sources. This style of stating things without saying how we know them works against the stated aim of encouraging people to be inquisitive.

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