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Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge: A Deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again | 
 enlarge | Authors: Mangesh Hattikudur, Elizabeth Hunt
Creator: Will Pearson
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $10.17
You Save: $4.78 (32%)
New (30) Used (44) Collectible (5) from $2.49
Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 19237
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 345
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060568062
Dewey Decimal Number: 031.02
EAN: 9780060568061
ASIN: 0060568062
Publication Date: April 27, 2004
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
Armed with expert information and a biting wit, mental floss's Condensed Knowledge officially takes the chore out of learning. The book's 15 chapters, covering everything from pop culture to physics, are jam-packed with lucid explanations, intriguing facts, and a smug irreverence you're bound to love. Who else is going to tell you about 3 Major Mistakes on Your World Map, or which 5 Literary Classics Were Written Under the Influence, or which Nobel Prize Should Never Been Awarded, or what the 4 Things Einstein Got Wrong are? Brush over the titles, flip through the pages, ease into a paragraph of your choice. And an hour later, when your kids are tugging at your pant legs and your spouse is burning dinner, and you're busy wondering just where the time went, you'll realize that learning isn't just easy, it's addictive.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Entertaining trivia May 14, 2008
If you like cocktail party nuggets of knowledge, then you'll enjoy this compendium. Each chapter contains an array of quirky topics, and each has a few paragraphs on the subject, which might be about odd subjects such as religions with supernatural females, or how certain emperors met their fate. It is the light hearted kind of tome you can pick up and put down repeatedly, and each time find something new.
 I'm not as dumb as I thought... or maybe I am. November 24, 2007
Great book, which I suspected before I bought it. I was thrilled to find a topic I already had done quite a bit of research on and had also bored my family and friends to tears with... "Rock Stars who Died at 27" (might not be right on title, but you get my drift). I was so thrilled to see that I wasn't the only one expounding on it! Other than that, so much information, so interesting... well done.
Fun book, and informative, too November 9, 2007
There seems to be a trend over the last 10 years of books that try to make academic subjects more enjoyable and interesting--series such as the Idiot's and Dummies books, for example--which are often well done despite their light-hearted approach. This book seems to follow in their footsteps. Sure, it sometimes glosses over the subject matter, and doesn't go into a lot of technical detail, but if you consider that after reading one of the chapters in this book on, say, general science, history, or literature, the average person will probably know more than they remember from that college course of many years ago, these books do perform a useful service.
Of course, the pundits can always claim that they're just dumbing down their subject, but on the other hand, what better way to get the current semi-literate generation raised on MTV and video games to actually read something worthwhile for a change?
At this point I might fall into that category myself. :-) I was one of the "grinds," who studied sedulously and diligently while the other students were goofing off or partying, but what with the ravages of age and memory, much of that learning had been forgotten. When I read the chapter on art history, for example, I learned some new things, and many things that I had forgotten came back. Funny how powerful the principle of multiple association is, and memory psychologists have of course studied this in detail. But for me reading this book not only gave me some new insights but brought back so much that I had forgotten. So for me it was truly a little trip down "memory lane."
You'll find all the usual academic subjects here, as well as juicy tidbits and trivia such as "rock stars that died at 27." Sometimes the choice of a topic just seems to come from left field, such as in "The Ceremony of the Bambara People," in the Theater chapter, but it's all fun and you still learn a lot. (Oddly enough, my father, who was an amateur collecter of Africa art, had a Bambara antelope sculpture in his collection).
The book is well written and is just chock full of fun information, trivia, and facts. It's a fun, enjoyable, and even seductive little romp through many fields of learning, and gets points for performing a useful educational service. If people in this country just knew what was in this book they'd be a lot better off than they are now.
great book July 29, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
simply a delight to read. it's great to cram all of these random facts in when you have nothing else to do. even would make a great book for the loo.
just as it says March 22, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Just as it promises, this is a fine book to get condensed knowledge on just about anything. It also stimulates you to research further on the subjects that intrigue you. Hmmm, I might have to pass this on to my teenage son and see if it stimulates his curiousity beyond video games...
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