City Travel Guides
Home Page > Go back a page
Books : QI: The Book of General Ignorance
Search Books - select a category
See Larger Image |
QI: The Book of General Ignorance by: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson List Price: £12.99 City Travel Guides Price: £4.76 You Save: £8.23 (63%)Prices subject to change. |
|
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780571233687 ISBN: 0571233686 Label: Faber and Faber Manufacturer: Faber and Faber Number Of Pages: 304 Publication Date: October 05, 2006 Publisher: Faber and Faber Studio: Faber and Faber Sales Rank: 214 Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - QI I really enjoyed reading this book and found it more than "Quite Interesting". Unfortunately though, if you are an avid fan of the television series like I am it offers nothing new. Most, if not all, of the material is taken from the series. Rating:  - Perfect bedtime readingAs has been mentioned before, this loose tie-in to the BBC QI programme feels rather like shuffling through a box of randomly shuffled Trivial Pursuit cards and peeking at the (often surprising) answers. There is a bit more to it than that though. The subjects are grouped together into some approximation of commonality - the animal world, war, inventors, science, colours etc. and each topic does go into some depth about its subject. Often, and most fascinatingly, this includes exploring how myths have grown around the subject. Many of the facts will surprise you (one of my eye-openers was that the Celtic ethnicity as we understand it today has only existed since 21st June 1792), whereas many will already be widely known ... Read More: Rating: - Great fun for trivia nerdsThis is a very entertaining book that you can pick up and browse for short periods. It helps you to challenge all the things that you assume you know. It delights in debunking popular misconceptions - for example that glass is really a very slow-moving liquid. Glass is a solid. At times it is a little precious and pedantic. I am sure that some of its claims can be challenged. However, it remains one of my favourite bedside books. Recommended. Rating: - fun but tedious at timesThis is a fun book to pick up and put down at leisure but it loses something for not being delivered by the dry tones of Stephen Fry. If you are an avid watcher of the series you will have heard most of these entries before but there are still some gems among them. Some of the explanations do go on and there seems to be a fascintaion with space that just doesn't excite me but there were a few chuckles along the way. At the end there is a disclaimer inviting readers to send in alternative answers or explanations which does dilute the whole thing a bit. Good for picking up trivia to delight your mates at the pub. Rating: - Not entirely fact...It's a good book, easy to read, informative and amusing. In fact, it's so informative that one is tempted to learn parts of it as ammunition for showing off how impressively clever you are to your friends; dismissing common knowledge as fiction is a satisfying thing to do. That is, until you come across something that the book claims to be true which you know in fact to be false (or more likely, not the entire truth). And by "know" I mean parts that cross over with my degree and which I have studied actual research journals on. Once I realised that the book takes liberties for the sake of sounding a bit impressive and sensational, I lost faith in pretty much everything else it claimed to be true. I'm sure alot of it is genuine, but how do you ... Read More: |
|