Currents, Feb. 16, 2006
'Forbidden Knowledge' filled with fun, easy-to-read facts
By Les Roberts

I know—I've heard it before.

You love to read, you say fervently and sincerely, but somehow you can't find the time anymore. Your job is stressful and you spend 60 hours a week chipping away at it. You dote on your kids—who don't even slightly resemble children of my age who were sent outside to play until dinnertime and didn't have to go through 20 extra hours per week of supervised play and sports and cultural classes, overseen and driven all over town by their parents. Of course there's the golf. And the tennis. And the clubs and organizations. Reading-especially reading fiction-has dropped through the crack in the table along with everything else.

Even when you attempt to read a novel, it takes you months to get through it, sometimes putting it down for three weeks or so before resuming. By that time, especially if you're plowing through ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ you've totally forgotten who Grigory Vassilyevitch is from the last time you were reading, and have to go back to the beginning to find out.

Take it easy, then-and you won't have to rob a single minute from your fretting over your backhand. Read ‘Forbidden Knowledge’ (Collins, $14.95) and learn a busload of fascinating facts you probably never knew before.

Relax, now—it's not that kind of forbidden knowledge- or at least most enlightened people won't think so. Presented by mental_floss, it's a rambling collection of what they identify as ‘a smart guide to history's naughtiest bits,’ and covers practically everything from modern-day cannibals to adulterous presidents to great bank robberies.

Festooned on the front cover by a red seal reading ‘Caution: 100% Pure Evil,’ this book, edited by Will Pearson, Mangesh Hattikudur and Elizabeth Hunt, is neither pure nor evil. In most cases, it's a lot of fun.

You don't even have to start at the beginning if you choose not to. Just open the book at random and see what you find.

How about the chapter devoted to Sports Scams, Scandals, and Hoaxes, wherein you can read about a 69-year-old woman who was installed in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1932 until she was shot and killed here in Cleveland in 1980. When the then-coroner performed an autopsy it was discovered that Stella Walsh, born in Poland, actually possessed both male and female chromosomes and the accompanied body parts. She was then forevermore known as ‘Stella the Fella.’

In another chapter about Well-Spread Fabrications, you'll learn (while browsing) that elephants are really not afraid of mice, that throwing rice at weddings will not cause birds to gobble them up and then explode, and that Vincent Van Gogh only cut off a small piece of his ear during a rage, not the entire thing-and he definitely did not mail it to a ‘working girl,’ either. Even if he did, I have no idea how that particularly grisly rumor got started.

I particularly enjoyed the short list of ‘Artists Who Were Full of Themselves.’ Mega-celebrities like Orson Welles, Frank Lloyd Wright, Al Jolson and Alfred Hitchcock were, to the editors at least, all certifiable egomaniacs that it's probably better almost none of us met them personally. Uh-oh, scratch that! I did meet Orson Welles. But it was just once.

And do you really want to read about the early life of Osama bin Laden? Among a small collection of Famous Figures Who Never Held Day Jobs, we'll learn that Osama was the heir to billions, and until he was 22 he squandered his days as a drinker and womanizer. And it took him more than 20 more years to come up with his heinous mastermind of the September 11th attack.

If there are any other entries herein that will upset you, feel free to skip around. It's a lot easier consuming ‘Forbidden Knowledge’ in dribs and drabs rather than trying to encompass an entire plot, vivid and provocative characters, and an ending in which all the miscreants get theirs.

And I guarantee that reading it won't keep you awake longer than five minutes at a stretch. Not even in the daytime.

Copyright © 2006 Currents.