Chock-full of surprises, insight, and learning opportunities.
A collection features oddities from around the world and bizarre facts amassed during the last 100 years.
Readers with a penchant for unusual things will find a bevy of them in this oversized, full-color collection compiled by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (Odd Is Art, 2018, etc.). The book is divided into broad categories that frequently merge, including animals, pop culture, and people. An extensive index, however, can point readers to more specific subjects, like fashion or rooster snake killer. Many of the tidbits in the volume are food-related. A resort in Mexico, for example, offers a primo taco with caviar, lobster, and more for patrons willing to shell out $25,000. In Palau, Micronesia, fruit bat soup comes with broth and the entire creature. And in 2017, a no-hands, yak yogurt drinking contest took place in China. But the assemblage by the 100-year-old Ripley franchise also showcases remarkable people and animals. Short, intermittent interviews spotlight individuals such as Alabamian Lucy Gafford, who dabbles in shower-hair art, and Laetitia Ky of Abidjan, Africa, who sculpts her hair into shapes or hand gestures. Other species are curious as well: Officials in Bangkok put a wild macaque monkey on a strict diet after tourists’ leftover junk food precipitated his obesity; and mantis shrimp have a punch that’s faster than humans can blink. Even pop culture often astounds: A honey bun resembles the titular alien of the 1982 film E.T.; and William Moulton Marston, inventor of the polygraph machine, also created Wonder Woman. The educational value of this collection is without question. While details on animals, culture, etc. come in brief, singular paragraphs, they are informative and will surely send readers, young and old alike, to the internet to learn more. The prose is particularly respectful of the variety of cultures and figures throughout but is occasionally tongue-in-cheek. For instance, a write-up on open-air urinals in Chongqing, China, warns readers to “Pee afraid. Pee very afraid.” Similarly, the story of World War II spy Virginia Hall, who had a prosthetic leg, stresses that she escaped Nazi-occupied France on foot. Despite a good deal of contemporary trivia (from the previous year or two), much of the material, as the title implies, covers the last century. Information on the Towers of Silence, where Zoroastrians in Iran and India have long placed their dead for vultures to pick apart, is even accompanied by a 1926 sketch by company founder, Robert Ripley. There’s little wasted space on the pages of the coffee-table book, which boasts an abundance of vibrant photographs. Sometimes they’re shocking, like making a spiderlike fly larger than life or offering a close-up of an Ethiopian tribe’s annual stick fight, particularly the pre-event consumption of cow blood. But the pictures are more often astonishingly beautiful: A two-page display of the Kite Festival in Guatemala is a veritable explosion of giant, multicolored kites. The volume likewise takes advantage of new media. Some stories focus on YouTubers and Instagrammers while a recurring section, “Your Uploads,” are tales that readers have submitted.
Chock-full of surprises, insight, and learning opportunities.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60991-217-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ripley Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
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