anoop dixith

Like most other reviews of this book highlights, I too got this book as a gift (Christmas Gift to be specific), and I do think this is a great gift not only for people who're interested in facts, trivia, quizzes etc, but for folks that are simply curious about everything in general (which is 90% junk, 5% not-junk yet useless, 4% unnecessary but cool, and 1% probably helpful at some point in life), a category of people I tend to belong to. I personally enjoyed the book thoroughly and have underlined hundreds of my favorite things across chapters. I didn't honestly think the book would be really that gratifying and amusing when I saw the cover which flaunted a numerical, Fermi-question-esque fact, the least interesting kind of trivia (if you wanna know, the fact said there are about 32 million bacteria on every square inch of the human body, duh!) All the above said, the book is not without scope for upgrading. Firstly, there's no information whatsoever about the author(s) of the book, or at least the editor(s), or compiler(s). It could as well be someone picked some interesting pages from Wikipedia and made them a book. Even that would have been better, because none of the facts listed in the book carry ANY source information about them. I trust them, don't get me wrong, but you can't expect the core audience of this book - inquisitive people, to be as less skeptical of things they read as myself. Another place where it might need some changes is the categorization of topics! There are some really thought-provoking ones, but some very banal. I personally like "Extraordinary Explorers", "Game Changing Inventions", and "Outer Space", and found a few others like "Unprofessional Sports", "Way-Out Professions", and "Supernatural and Superweird" barely tolerable. But I do concur that a majority of stories told in the book are supremely intriguing, and to the most part, not the ones you'd already know. I can imagine short, even animated, 7-10 minute Youtube videos made on most of the stories and incidents mentioned in the book.