“The Dictionary of Misinformation”, by Tom Burnam

 

334 pages, Ballantine, ISBN-13: 978-0060913151

 

The Dictionary of Misinformation by Tom Burnam (or is it Tom Burnam’s The Dictionary of Misinformation?) is not a book you sit down to read cover-to-cover, but rather to open now and again just to see what kind of fact jumps out at you…like these, for instance:

• The bagpipe was not a Scottish invention
• Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball at Cooperstown (or anywhere else in America)
• London’s Big Ben is neither a clock nor a tower
• Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat, and the boat he built was not called the Clermont
• Cleopatra was not Egyptian
• Lizzie Borden was acquitted
• Scores of persons had flown nonstop across the Atlantic before Lindbergh
• No witches were burned at Salem
• Edison did not invent the light bulb
• Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson”
• Mark Twain was not born in Hannibal, Missouri
• There is no such thing as an aphrodisiac (alack)

Entries are listed by chapter in alphabetical order, correcting various misconceptions, subject by subject. While the Internet has, by and large, replaced bathroom books such as this (it’s been out of print for a dog’s age, dating from the mid-1970s), the overall message of the book if read it from cover to cover is: don’t be naïve, check your facts first, statistics can be misused and “valid” doesn’t mean “true”. An interesting diversion, if nothing else.