Everything You Know is Wrong - book review

I'll have to admit that the cover of this book fairly screams to be read. After all no one wants to be told, "Everything you know is wrong!! The problem is that this book doesn't really even say that.
Everything You Know is Wrong, the Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies edited by Russ Kick really just says that nothing is simple and anyone who tries to explain something in a simple way is going to get some things wrong. I found most of the articles in the book similar to whatever lawmaking body that was which found the value of pi too confusing so they passed a law making it equal 3.0. Just saying something is wrong doesn't make it so.

Maybe a better title would have been "Everything You Know is Subject to Debate". Except that certain things, by definition, are not subject to debate so there you go again. If you define 3 as 1 more than 2 and normal math signs to mean what they normally mean then 3=2+1 isn't debatable. But 2+2=4 might be because we haven't defined that relationship or the number 4 sufficiently. And some of the articles in this book are about at that level.

In fact, some articles are excellent because they do remind us that there is another side to a story that we may all have forgotten about. Others remind us that even an ogre must have a mother who loves him. Why else would someone still push that side of the story on us? I found the book about as exciting as reading an encyclopedia, an older one that needs updating badly (not to be badly updated).

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I was all ready to publish this when I got a notice from one of my blogreaders telling me I should read The Book of General Ignorance - Everything You Think You Know is Wrong by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson.

The similarities of the titles just cry out for a comparison between the two books. But it would be like comparing apples and oranges. The two books are really, really different. General Ignorance has no footnotes or endnotes and thus appeals to the reader to take everything in the book on faith. There are no chapter attributions so we must conclude that each section of the book is written by one or the other of the authors or maybe both.

The style is very similar to Snopes.Com or to a Reader's Digest article. Each topic is introduced by a question which sounds familiar, maybe a trivia question you saw on TV and the answer fairly trips over itself trying to get out of the reader's mouth. But that ISN'T the answer. Some other person, place or thing needs to be substituted in the equation to get it correct. In my mind, the book is a fairly good collection of urban folk tales debunked but with no citations. You just have to accept it on faith.

If I had to choose between the two books reviewed, I would definitely prefer "The book of General Ignorance" because it is more fun to read. I think it would make a better coffee table or bathroom book than "Everything You Know is Wrong".