The Book of General Ignorance

Read an Excerpt

Part 1
What's the name of the tallest mountain in the world? Mauna Kea, the highest point on the island of Hawaii. The inactive volcano is a modest 13,799 feet above sea level, but when measured from the seabed to its summit, it is 33,465 feet high

Part 2
What's the largest living thing? It's a mushroom. And it's not even a particularly rare one. You've probably got the honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree stump.

Part 3
How long can a chicken live without its head? About two years. On September 10, 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem

Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British bestseller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more,

The Book of General Ignorance is a witty "gotcha" compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It'll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.

Revealing the truth behind all the things we think we know but don't, this book leaves you dumbfounded about all the misinformation you've managed to collect during your life, and sets you up to win big should you ever be a contestant on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Besides righting the record on common (but wrong) myths like Captain Cook discovering Australia or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, The Book of General Ignorance also gives us the skinny on silly slipups to trot out at dinner parties (Cinderella wore fur, not glass, slippers and chicken tikka masala was invented in Scotland, not India).

Thomas Edison said that we know less than one millionth of one percent about anything: this book makes us wonder if we know even that much.

John Mitchinson writes for the British television show QI, and drinks in the same pub as John Lloyd..

John Lloyd is the producer of the hit British comedy shows Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, and Spitting Image..

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