Genre: Non-Fiction
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Bill McLain is a Xerox web master with access to some of the most outlandish questions submitted to the Xerox web site. He decide to compile some of these interesting questions/answers in Do Fish Drink Water?: Puzzling and Improbable Questions and Answers. The book is broken down into chapters featuring twenty subjects. Each question is followed by a well structured answer, a few paragraphs titled factoids and a small section titled "did you know."
I learned how many licks are needed to get to the center of a tootsie pop (142), that sometimes the sun really does turn green in Ireland, and that it would take 33,683 years to vacuum the entire state of Ohio. Some of the questions are more scholarly. I was surprised to learn that Mark Twain submitted the first typed manuscript to a publisher...Tom Sawyer, and that blind people do dream non-visual dreams.
I really enjoy books that focus on all the trivia that surrounds us, and McLain does a good job selecting a variety of odd questions, but I can not vouch for their accuracy. Each section ends with a list of places that one can look to find more information in that category, and occasionally the answers differ a bit from those McLain gives us. That being said, this book is fun for all ages. I think it will make a good gift for my fourteen year old grandson, and I think it will be equally interesting for my dad. Although originally published several years ago, it is the kind of book that never gets outdated, and think about all the conversations you can initiate at those boring business dinners.
- Beverly
Publisher - HarperCollins
Date of Publication - October 12, 2010
I learned how many licks are needed to get to the center of a tootsie pop (142), that sometimes the sun really does turn green in Ireland, and that it would take 33,683 years to vacuum the entire state of Ohio. Some of the questions are more scholarly. I was surprised to learn that Mark Twain submitted the first typed manuscript to a publisher...Tom Sawyer, and that blind people do dream non-visual dreams.
I really enjoy books that focus on all the trivia that surrounds us, and McLain does a good job selecting a variety of odd questions, but I can not vouch for their accuracy. Each section ends with a list of places that one can look to find more information in that category, and occasionally the answers differ a bit from those McLain gives us. That being said, this book is fun for all ages. I think it will make a good gift for my fourteen year old grandson, and I think it will be equally interesting for my dad. Although originally published several years ago, it is the kind of book that never gets outdated, and think about all the conversations you can initiate at those boring business dinners.
- Beverly
Publisher - HarperCollins
Date of Publication - October 12, 2010
