An irregular feature, where we review books purchased for less than one US Dollar (not including tax). Are we destroying the publishing industry as we know it?

Contrary to Popular Belief: More Than 250 False Facts Revealed
by Joey Green
Broadway Books, 2005
260 Pages
ISBN 0-7679-1992-0
Original price: $9.95
What I paid: $0.25
Purchased from: Friends of the Library sale
Condition: Like New

In any sufficiently long-lived culture, it is inevitable that a thick strand of myth will get woven into the cultural consciousness. At least, it certainly seems that way, especially when one hears the same old urban legends spring up in one conversation after another. What does one do when presented, yet again, with some erroneous bit of trivia from a well-meaning source? It’s a problem (a petty, bourgeois sort of problem, but still).

There are a variety of solutions, depending on the situation. If the offending factoid is something you overheard well, of course, keep your mouth shut. Butting into someone else’s conversation in order to correct a misplaced fact or two is incredibly rude. However, when you’re directly engaged in conversation with someone who gets things the wrong way round, the situation is more complex. Do you care what this person thinks of you? Will they “throw-down” if contradicted? You don’t want to end up in the emergency room over some argument about whether strawberries are actually berries, or not.

This is where Contrary to Popular Belief, might come in handy. If you find yourself in the aforementioned social situation; and if the error is concerning one of the more than 250 “false facts” contained within; then you might want to politely excuse yourself from the conversation, and present your pal with a copy of the book at the next gift-giving opportunity. This is a book that’s practically begs to be passed along.

It won’t take most folk very long to read; you could probably get through it at least twice in a week. It’s fortunate, then, that this book is as fun as it is short. It’s not a reference work, but rather a cute collection of trivial bits of information, all linked by the fact that they contradict commonly-held beliefs that just happen to be wrong. Each entry gets one page a piece, though their lengths vary quite a bit, and some of the topics could have benefited from being expanded.

One of the things that I found interesting is that the entry headings were not consistent in their phrasing. Many of them are simple negations (e.g., “The world’s largest pyramid is not in Egypt”), while others are positive statements of fact (“George Washington was the ninth president of the United States”). In each case, I’m sure that the author chose one type of statement over another for reasons of clarity or effect. But, in light of studies that seem to indicate that denials often reinforce wrong information, I wonder how much truth the average reader is likely to retain from this book.

Actually, that’s an open question anyway: While there is a list of sources at the back of the book, there are no in-text citations, footnotes, or endnotes. I know this is a shallow book that’s meant to be read for entertainment purposes only, but if the Darwin Awards books can cite the original sources in footnotes, surely such a thing would be possible for Green, in Contrary.

Although he says in the introduction that he “locked [himself] away in the library, checking and double-checking the facts”, I do wonder exactly how long it took Joey Green to write this book. This list of his other works indicates that he’s rather prolific, and there’s tricks to every trade. It wouldn’t surprise me if he simply jotted down a bunch of facts that he’s run across over the years, looked up enough background info to write a paragraph or two for each, drew some illustrations, and then called it a day.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, actually. Almost any collection of trivia is likely to be an array of facts gleaned from other sources, marginally rephrased; Ben Schott, Cecil Adams, and Alex Trebek have made careers out of this kind of thing. (It’s often not worth doing original research for something as trivial as trivia.)

Yet, the question is not how much time� Green spent on this book, it’s whether or not the overall experience is good. And it is, mostly. But,� don’t expect every entry to be a homerun; there are a few that fail to amuse. For example, entries of the “Well, duh” variety, like “Shooting stars are not stars shooting across the sky.” Were this a book for children, I could see how this might be worth including; in a book for adults, however, it seems like filler. And, since the premise of the book is that it’s attempting to counteract widely believed “false facts”, it seems way off the mark.

Following that point, with some entries it feels like Green isn’t so much blasting apart common fallacies as he is splitting hairs. For example, the entry titled “Leonardo da Vinci did not paint the Mona Lisa,” rests on the premise that da Vinci called the painting La Gioconda, when it was finished. This is semantic slight-of-hand. Yes, during his lifetime, da Vinci probably never referred to the painting as the Mona Lisa. (From Wikipedia: “The painting’s title stems from a description by Giorgio Vasari in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci published in 1550, 31 years after the artist’s death. ‘Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife….’”)

But whatever da Vinci called the thing, it’s almost universally known as the Mona Lisa, nowadays. Sure, if you could drag Leonardo 500 years into the future and ask him if he painted the Mona Lisa, you’d get a confused “Che cosa?” in return. But if you took him to the Louvre, pointed his gob at this thing…

. ..and asked him if he painted it, he’d say, “Si!”

The Mona Lisa is a real thing, a real painting that was painted by Leonardo da Vinci. It doesn’t matter if what he called it. What Green’s done here is to stretch a point for no great purpose. There’s a few other examples of this kind of linguistic quibbling. (See also: King James did not sign the Magna Carta, and The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line.)

I’ll grant that, for some of these examples, Green might be technically correct, or “correct, in a certain way,” but these things are likely to be distracting to nit-pickers, oddly enough, because the rational behind them is just too nit-picky.

Still, there’s not that many distracting entries, all told, and, if you can get past them, the book remains entertaining. If you get a chance to pick it up for under a dollar (possibly more, if you’re flush), I’d recommend it.

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