Fantasyland

 

Fantasyland : how America went haywire : a 500-year history / Kurt Andersen, read by the author, 475 pgs.

500 years in slightly fewer pages, much of this is a very interesting thread of how attitudes and beliefs have changed in this country.  Some where we picked up the idea that we are all so "individual" that we have the right to believe things...whatever things we want to believe.  Reason went out the window and conspiracy theory's and fantasy took over.  On the one hand, I found this fascinating, on the other hand, it was terrifying.  As a librarian, the idea that facts are optional isn't popular.  Surely we can do better, but will we?

Factfulness

Factfulness: ten reasons we're wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think / Hans Rosling w/ Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, 342 pgs.

Hey, a ray of light...a little bit of sunshine...maybe things aren't so bad after all.  So why do we think they are so bad?  In his ode to ignorance, Hans Rosling and his son and daughter-in-law show us how to evaluate information and avoid traps.  Yes, it is bad that some children die before age 5 but how does the present day number compare to our recent past?  How does each country compare to itself and other countries?  How do we systematically evaluate solutions to this an other societal problems?  This book gives us ten reasons why a chimp randomly picking answers did better on a test of 13 global facts than any other group.  A wonderful book that will help change the way you look at the world.

1,227 quite interesting facts to blow your socks off

1,227 quite interesting facts to blow your socks off / John Lloyd, Johns Mitchinson, and James Harkin 334 pgs.

Well not all of them blew my socks off but there are a few that came close.  Did you know that Typewriters used to be known as "literary pianos?" How about that Eskimos use refrigerators to stop their food from freezing? Oh yea, if you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.  AND, lava can flow as fast as a sprinting greyhound.  But now I have to dringle (waste time in a lazy manner).

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