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QI: The Book of General Ignorance | 
 enlarge | Authors: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
Creator: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy Used: £0.96
You Save: £12.03 (93%)
New (36) Used (34) from £0.96
Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 58
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Television tie-in edition
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0571233686
EAN: 9780571233687
ASIN: 0571233686
Publication Date: October 5, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 General Ignorance is not just trivia October 9, 2006
A. Sunnucks (UK)
167 out of 175 found this review helpful
I read the Book of General Ignorance over the week-end. Although I have hundreds of trivia books they all pale into insignificance against this brilliant work which I shall genuinely enjoy forever.
Trivia books leave you feeling you're lacking something. There's something frustrating about a three line `fact' which is unsubstantiated and unexplained.
The Book of General Ignorance is a completely different animal, it awakens curiosity, is hilariously written, illuminating and leaves you desperate to fascinate your friends and family with your newly discovered wonders of the world around us. For once you can explain the background to your discovery and WHY it is so.
A fantastic read, highly recommended.
Generally Ignorant? October 21, 2006
Mr. A. ONeil Uk
153 out of 168 found this review helpful
Everyone enjoys the BBC2 programme QI. This book takes you through the journey of General Ignorance that will hopefully turn you from the puppy like Alan Davies into a budding Stephen Fry.
There are plenty of books around that attempt to teach you that what you think you know isn't quite true but this one is the definitave guide to knowledge.
So if you think America invented Baseball (It was the English), Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet(Alfred Giblin), and Jaffa cakes (Apricot) are flavoured with orange jelly then this is the book for you.
'Wide' beats 'deep' any day... October 18, 2006
Christopher Gray
155 out of 171 found this review helpful
How many people, wanting to know "what it's all about" ambitiously pick up heavyweight volumes of science or history but can't make it past the first chapter? Probably quite a few, myself included. While knowing lots about a narrow area is very much encouraged these days, in schools and universities (ironically), that very narrowness makes it harder to connect your increasing knowledge together; to help get an 'integrated view' of the world; to get across the wonderful stuff you've found out in a way that others can relate to.
That's where this book really scores very highly: it delves deeply enough into the subject material - which is liberally scattered across as many disciplines as you'd find in any university curriculum (and some you won't) - but always manages to pull out into a wide-shot before the end, linking the main facts in each case to other juicy and tempting avenues of knowledge in related areas. It's like wandering through one of those ancient stately homes occupied by billionaire eccentrics who collect everything - it's organised enough to give you some cultural or chronological context, but there's also enough diversity, and also an uncannily hard-to-pin-down method to the madness. Right next to the shrunken heads section there are lightning generating machines and 19th Century robotic chess-players...
The writing style is simple uncomplicated, and never gets in the way of the material. You won't find exclamation marks or lame jokes, but you will notice a suffusion of - well, there's only one word for it - *passion* about the interestingness of the material. You realise that the authors just love this stuff, and you can't help but get pulled in yourself.
"A perfect Boxing Day Book", as I've heard it said...
Ask More Questions October 11, 2006
Dr. S. Ratcliffe (Oxford, UK)
139 out of 155 found this review helpful
Everywhere we look today, we get quick-fixes to knowing stuff. One glance at the bestseller shelves yields a stack of books telling us how-to, when-to and in what manner to change our wallpaper, wardrobes or fundamental life philosophy. The Book of General Ignorance offers something quite different. Leafing through, I certainly found our hundreds of things I didn't know . The scope is spectacular, ranging from details about the private parts of an earwig to the real way lemmings drop off this mortal coil via accounts of galactic activity. The book itself makes humble claims. As one of its authors, John Lloyd, puts it - it doesn't really scratch the surface of `the really interesting questions' like `What is light? Or love? Or laughter?' . But it does offer an answer to one of life's bigger questions: `What is interestingness'. Humane, funny, fascinating, this is a gift of a book.
A real gem January 27, 2007
D. A. Peacock (St. Albans UK)
32 out of 35 found this review helpful
An absolute cracking read. Both informative and hilarious at the same time. It is such a broad spectrum of topics covered that it'll appeal to everyone, whether they watch the TV series or not. I shan't spoil the joy of discovery for you but I'll recommend this book whole heartedly. In a market that seems saturated with apparently funny books this stands head and shoulders above the others.
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