Product Description

Here, 101 marvellous facts are brilliantly explained: why do we have nails? Why is the sky blue? Why can birds stand on electric wires and not be electrocuted? This title enables you to educate your child with minimum effort, and in blissful peace and quiet. It is a perfect source of fascinating facts for any child who doesn't want to be Boring when they Grow Old.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71823 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Tracey Turner is a former editor and author of many non-fiction books for children including Hodder's Digusting Dictionary and titles for the Dead Famous series. Tracey lives in South London. Richard Horne is a designer of record covers (Faith No More and Tom Jones), book jackets (Paul Morley, Sean French and the Harry Potter series) and websites (www.dancingeyes.net, www.ashwednesday.co.uk and www.oryxandcrake.co.uk), as well as a greetings card and magazine illustrator (the Guardian and Sugar magazine). A self-confessed chancer and left-hander, he lives in East London.

Customer Reviews

Great gift for your 10 or 11-year old niece or nephew
This book has almost packaged itself too well - it looks like it's designed for adults, along the lines of "Does anything eat wasps?". A closer examination reveals that this is in fact a brilliant, brilliant kids book for the intelligent, enquiring kid who is somewhere between primary and secondary school. It's gorgeously designed, with colour "question"pages - which aim to answer a range of mostly science-based questions (such as, "Will your stomach explode if you eat too much?" or "Why is the sea salty?") - facing monochrome "activity" pages with experiments and other interactive questioning which the reader is encouraged to fill in. What really puts this book ahead of similar offerings is that the information is well-researched, up-to-date, yet nevertheless pitched perfectly at its target audience (The two pages on "why are farts smelly?" encourage the reader to make such distinctions as "Who seems to enjoy farting most?" and "who seems to be most embarassed when they fart?"). I think this book will discreetly encourage an interest in science while seeming to be rude, fun and mildly subversive; I think it's great and almost too good for kids! (No, I'm not the author, I picked it up in a charity shop for 25p!!!)

Courtesy of Teens Read Too
If you're looking for a way to simultaneously increase your knowledge and wow your friends with your infinite brainiac abilities, than this is definitely the book for you!

101 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW...AND SOME YOU DON'T! includes just that -- 101 sometimes interesting, sometimes obscure, sometimes downright gross facts about everything from science, nature, and animals to the universe, history, and the human body.

Some of my favorites include "What is the worse smell ever?" Answer: a toss-up between a skunk, a corpse flower, and durian fruit, which smells like raw sewage. Or "Are you only ever a few feet from a rat in a big city?" Answer: pretty much, yes. Which, when you think about it, is quite disgusting. "How much does the earth weigh?" Answer: a little over 13 million billion billion pounds. And you thought you needed to go on a diet!

The book also includes handy-dandy stickers, which you can use to mark your progress when you've learned a new fact, additional facts and data that (mostly) have something to do with the fact you've just mastered, and extras such as a checklist, extra paper, and a list where you can mark down things you'd like to know that weren't covered in the book.

So, although this is a book that can most assuredly make you look smart(er) in front of your friends, results aren't guaranteed to last forever -- unless you put a little brain power into it!

Reviewed by: Jennifer Wardrip, aka "The Genius"