mental floss presents Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to… (2005)

Forbidden Knowledge is a wonderful book of lists ostensibly arranged by a peculiar system. The book, trying to be as salacious as possible, organizes its lists into categories relating to the seven deadly sins. There’s a section on lust, one on envy, one on gluttony, and so on. It’s fun, but some lists are a bit of a stretch (such as the list of religious “Diets”, or conventions, in the gluttony section). All in all, I picked up some extra party trivia.

http://lifelongdewey.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/031-mental-flosss-forbidden-knowle... ( )

Mental Floss magazine — or mental_floss, as it likes to call itself ‚ makes fascinating reading if you have any interest in historical trivia and cultural oddities. There have also been a number of Mental Floss books, and I just finished one of them, "mental_floss presents: Forbidden Knowledge."

The cover contains the following phrases as enticements: "contains poison," "evil — 100 percent pure" and "history's naughtiest bits." This is mostly foolishness. There is little here that is or ever was forbidden. You'll find evil in these pages, but also stupidity, oddity and simple accident. And if it's naughtiness you want, this is probably not the book to take off the shelf.

Once you get past the cover, however, "Forbidden Knowledge" provides fascinating and informative reading. The authors — and there are a bunch of them — divide the contents according to the 7 Deadly Sins. Under pride, for example, they list "5 Artists Who Were Full of Themselves," including Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Al Jolson and giving a smartly-written paragraph about each.

Under greed we find "3 Evangelists Who Received Until It Hurt" — Reverend Ike, Benny Hinn and Robert Tilton.

For lust there's "6 Portraits of Artists as Young Perverts" — Rousseau, Lewis Carroll, Rene Descartes, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay and F. Scott Fitzgerald. For Fitzgerald, the best they can come up with is that he "may have had a foot fetish."

All this provides interesting reading, but "Interesting Knowledge" probably wouldn't have made a very good title. ( )

Fun read for trivia buffs presented in an appealing way. Categorized under the 7 Deadly Sins, there is a wide array of information. ( )

The staff of Mental Floss magazine must have grown up loving The People's Almanacs as much as I did. I re-read those books over and over and when I left home my mom allowed me to take them with me. Mental Floss is for anyone who loves finding out weird bits of information about people and events from history, like the fact that the Ottoman Empire lost its footing when a lazy sultan, nicknamed "The Drunk", came to power and couldn't be bothered. It's a big book full of fun stuff. ( )

This was an enjoyable book, and perfectly suited for reading before falling asleep since it is a collection of small (usually 1-2 page) snippets of information. As someone who likes reading before bed but has a hard time putting down a book with a good plot, resulting in much less sleep than intended, this is a great alternative. It's arranged around the 7 deadly sins, which helps give it some structure, however, some of the entries were a little dry and I mostly skimmed over the Sloth section. But overall, it's interesting and I certainly did learn a few new facts that I've been able to use in casual conversation and on one occasion it helped me answer a trivia question. If you're a fan of the magazine (which I am), then I think you'll enjoy this book. I've moved on to another of theirs, "In the Beginning", which is also nice bedtime reading. ( )