John Oldale

This is a very impressive collection! I have long been a compiler of useless facts and trivia and I've seen it all before, so to speak, but 95% of the information in this book was entirely new to me. (Did you know Genghis Khan was a redhead? That Switzerland "accidentally" invaded Luxembourg with a force of 200 soldiers in 2007 and nobody in Luxembourg noticed? That the Hungarian language has 18 cases, 72 verb forms and no word for "to have"?) This would make good toilet and/or bedside reading, since the entries are short, and there are illustrations.

My only complaint is that I think the book could have been more democratic in terms of page space. The majority of countries got one page, but some got three or four, and in some cases he crammed several countries (almost all the Pacific island nations, for example, like Kiribati and Micronesia) into one or two pages. It would have been nice if each country got equal coverage. I understand that, say, Vanuatu, is not as significant as Japan or the United States, but surely Oldale could have come up with enough facts about it to cover a single page.… (altro)