Editorial Reviews:
With mental_floss's trademark smart-aleck approach, combined with hilarious (but true) trivia, world history has never been such a joyride.
History is . . .
(a) more or less bunk.
(b) a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
(c) as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis. Match your answers:
(1) Stephen Daedalus of James Joyce's Ulysses
(2) Henry Ford
(3) Arthur Schopenhauer It turns out that answer need not be bunk, nightmarish, or diseased. In the hands of mental_floss, history's most interesting bits have been handpicked and roasted to perfection. Packed with little-known stories and outrageous?but accurate?facts, you'll laugh yourself smarter on this joyride through 60,000 years of human civilization. Remember: just because it's true, doesn't mean it's boring! Exclusive: Amazonian Tips for Amazon.com  When you think of the word ?Amazon,? we?re sure the first thing that comes to mind is the fantastic website where you can buy our book (buy our book!) or half-naked warrior women. But here are three tantalizing tidbits you might not know--and why you need to act now. 1. Find Gold
There?s something about long, tropical rivers that seems to drive people batty. But the Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre was by all accounts a murderous sociopath long before he got to the Amazon. Take, for instance, the time a judge sentenced Aguirre to be flogged. The brutish Basque hunted the terrified magistrate across 4,000 miles of rough South American terrain, barefoot, to kill him! So, in 1560, it probably wasn?t the best idea to invite Aguirre along on the quest to find El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. After 900 miles of unbroken rain forest, Aguirre was fed up. He led a mutiny that killed more than half of his fellow conquistadors. Then, he declared himself prince of Peru, Tierra Firma, and Chile. Eventually he and his tiny army attacked Panama?where he was killed and dismembered so his body parts could be paraded around the colony.
The bright side: El Dorado is still out there, waiting for you to discover it! Just don?t bring a friend like Lope. 2. Invest a Dollar
When it?s not making people crazy, the Amazon seems to inspire bizarre, larger-than-life schemes. In 1967, American shipping magnate and billionaire Daniel Ludwig bought a larger-than-Connecticut sized chunk of the Amazon to create a gigantic industrial and agricultural complex called the Jari Project. It didn?t work out. All the construction led to massive soil erosion, screwing up the ?agricultural? part of his plan. After sinking $1 billion into the project (back when $1 billion really meant something) Ludwig called it quits in 1982. It was eventually put up for sale for $1--a great deal, if you?re willing to assume $354 million in debt.
The bright side: For anyone with a dollar and a dream, it?s your lucky day: the Jari Project is still for sale! 3. Make New Friends
The pictures of spear-wielding tribesmen produced in May 2008 may have been a hoax, but it?s true that there are literally dozens of so-called ?uncontacted? native tribes in the Amazon basin--Stone Age peoples who have never had any contact with the outside world! While this seems preposterous, it makes sense when you consider the Basin?s size, over 2.7 million square miles in area, half of which is covered by dense rain forest and divided by 15,000 rivers and tributaries. Altogether, there are believed to be about three dozen uncontacted tribes in Brazil and 15 in Peru.
The bright side: If you?re up for the adventure, you have more than 50 chances to claim fame and fortune. Just make sure you don?t accidentally give everyone smallpox. ? And so much more!
What you?ve just read isn?t available in our book, but don?t worry--roughly 82% of the rest of history is. Our twelve essential chapters tackle everything from civilization?s baby steps in the Fertile Crescent to the Pope?s first text message, the 6,000-pound super-wombats of early Australia to the Goose Crusade of 1096, the golden hemorrhoids of the Philistines to the most important assassinations of the 20th century, and everything else that?s wacky, entertaining, and completely, unbelievably true.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 39 total reviews (Page 1 of 8):
 Not what I was hoping for
Admittedly, I am not a frequent visitor to the Mental Floss website, but I do enjoy books that successfully blend entertainment with education. Unfortunately, I found this book too heavy on the latter and too light on the former.
The Mental Floss History of the World comes across as a sort of abridged textbook, lots of factoids, lots of blurbs that are admittedly pretty informational. Much of it is even interesting. But very little of it is actually funny, and that's what I wanted. The jokes were kind of stale and predictable, and most of the time I felt like I was getting a lecture from that dull teacher that thinks he's really funny, but he's not.
Maybe it works for the people more familiar with the tone of the website, but for me, it wasn't worth the read.  Irreverent? No. Interesting and fun? Yes.
Tired of boring and dull history books? Perhaps this is the book that will help you rethink your views on history. I haven't had a history class since my freshman college Western Civ 101 so this was a nice refresher book for me. It's the kind of book you pick up, read a chapter, put down and come back to a few days, weeks or even a month later and grab another little "snack." It isn't really a page-turner, but it's a fun and lighthearted look at history.
The book gives mostly a general overview of big events through time across the globe and dives in here and there for interesting little tidbits. It does try to stay fairly worldly, but it does the most time to western history (which is fine, I think). I learned a lot of interesting things I didn't know and found it generally enjoyable. I wouldn't really call it "irreverent" but that's okay. I wouldn't say this is a must-have, but if you see it on a bargain table or in a used-bin, it's worth picking up.  If Only History Class Were Like This
Confession time: history books generally make my eyes roll back in my head. But I love history, and always want to know more history. It's a conflict. Or it was, until this book appeared.
Staring in 60,000 BCE and romping forward to the present and beyond, History of the World examines wars, famines, conflicts, treaties, marriages... just about everything.
Pieces are done in short accessible bits. You can set the book down, then pick it up later for another installment of what feels like a great serial.
It's got cheat sheets to help you remember wars. It has fascinating number facts.
It's everything you wanted to know about history but were afraid to ask.
It's got a place of honor on my refernce shelf. Deeper and More Thoughtful than I Expected
I was pleasantly surprised at the level of detail contained in this book. I think I was expecting something along the lines of the Uncle John's Bathroom series of books...but I actually found the book deeper than that. I will be checking out other Mental Floss titles. interesting reading - in the style of mental floss
For those who are familiar with the publication Mental Floss, this book should not be foreign - in term of the writing style, scope and contents, and the general tone. Like the magazine, "The Mental Floss History of the World" is a collection of entertaining, sarcastic and wise-cracking short articles for readers who are into trivia. Like the namesake, "mental floss", this is not a scholarly compendium on world history, but more a collection of interesting trivia about world history that can be mildly intellectually satisfying. As a slight departure from the past Mental Floss publications which were mostly juxtapositions of chronologically unrelated trivia bits, not only does this book have a cohesive theme, it is arranged also in the chronological order of historic events, from the dawn of civilizations to modern day. My only beef with this book is that it is too focused on Western history, which is not horrible per se, but definitely not living up to the title "An Irreverent Romp through CIVILIZATION's Best Bits". Last time I checked, the civilization covers much more than western civilizations. More Customer Reviews:
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