Editors Of Mental Floss

I remembered the first Mental Floss book (History of the World) being funny, but not hilarious. I found some of What's the Difference hilarious and forced MT to listen to (in his opinion) way too much of it.

What's the Difference is a sort of cheat sheet for those things in life that are easy to mix-up: i.e. vs e.g. or The Illiad vs. The Odyssey or my personal achilles heel: Crazy Horse vs. Sitting Bull vs. Geronimo (I always mix these up!). They all start with a box at the top that includes a "Quick Trick" for telling the two subjects apart in a snap; some of them are really useful and some are more bent towards humour. Each vs. is two pages long with succinct, interesting and sometimes very funny summations of each subject.

This is the perfect book for long-term reading; since each vs. is only two pages long, it's easy to pick up and put down when you only have a moment to read. I, however, devoured it because I liked the writing, I love odd facts and there were more than a few of these that I found helpful. I had originally planned to skim through the ones I already knew the difference between, but found myself reading them just for the wisecracks.

A fun book; maybe a tad bit more fun than informative, but definitely worth it if you like fun facts.… (més)