Delightfully brilliant, interesting and funny all at once!

The facts in this book (an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher) were just a little too random for my taste, and the illustrations are extremely rudimentary (if sometimes amusing), so i cannot recommend this because I see no purpose to it unless you find it amusing to read a mix of true and at best "augmented" or at worst, possibly fictional "facts".

It quite literally does have random facts. The organization of the book is as rudimentary as the printing and illustration, but it does make some vague kind of sense. The facts however, are very short and completely unreferenced so it's hard ot know whether they relaly hard facts without a lot of research. I checked a (random!) few here and there, and most of what I checked seems to be true, but there were some glaring errors that would have been easy to fix has some simple fact-checking been indulged in online. Some, such as the church steeple in Germany which was stuck four times by lightning over several years, each time on April 18th were unverifiable. No, I don't believe that one!

This begs the question as to how some of these 'facts' arose. One I checked on, for example: that it is illegal to fall asleep in a cheese factory in Illinois, while technically true, is misleading. The Illinois statute forbids sleeping in food preparation places http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=1584&ChapAct=410 which is entirely reasonable, and which I imagine is also forbidden in other state laws, so to single out Illinois, and word the "fact" that way isn't exactly honest. I was more surprised that it was Illinois that was chosen rather than say Wisconsin, than I was impressed by this "fact"!

By the same token the California Fish and Game Code over not eating frogs used in jumping contests is a law aimed at preventing people capturing frogs for food (for which they would need a license), by claiming they were going to use them for a jumping contest (for which they would not need a license). In context, it's clear that the law is to protect amphibians from being eaten to extinction and makes perfect sense, and has nothing to do with "eating a frog that died in a jumping contest" per se. So once again, this "random fact" is highly misleading. I'd have liked this book a lot better if it had been vetted more stringently over the facts which appear in it.

The story of the five-year-old-girl mailed to her grandparents in 1914 is equally misleading. It was a four-year-old-girl named Charlotte Pierstorff, who was accompanied on a train by a postal clerk, so she wasn't exactly put into a cardboard box, stamped and dropped into a mailbox as the illustration suggests. So yes, it did happen, but again the random "fact" doesn't tell the whole story. Mailing children back then (right after the post office first introduced parcel post) wasn't exactly a complete rarity. The first child to be so mailed was a ten pound baby! It was unarguably bizarre and abusive in the extreme to modern minds, but innovative to impoverished families back then!

Yes live scorpions can be mailed, but the regs say nothing about live spiders being banned! They specifically permit "Other small, harmless, cold–blooded animals" which would include most spiders, and scorpions have restrictions ("Live scorpions (only under limited circumstances)"). So once again we find a "fact" that is not exactly up-front about what it purports.

In Serbia, there is a tradition of children tying up their mom on Materice day, but it's as part of Christmas celebrations. On a different day, parents tie up their kids. The idea is to get gifts as a 'ransom' for freeing the hostage. I'm not aware of such a tradition for Mother's Day, but I guess if they do it at Christmas, they might do it then, too. So while, like I said, a lot of what I checked did prove out (at least in part), there were far too many of these misleading ones, or ones which were wrong or uncheckable, so I felt rather disinclined to trust the other facts that I do not have the time spend checking. The book does not strike me as very trustworthy, and there really is no excuse these days for not verifying your 'facts'.

Some of the 'facts' are repeated in slightly different ways on different pages, and overall there are a lot of 'facts'. Some of these are weird and wonderful, others amusing, others not remotely surprising, but overall, I can't recommend it as a worthy read. You may not have these qualms, but for me, in an Internet age where misinformation and blind 'regifting' of trivia through endless, tedious chains of emails is the norm, I think it behooves all of use to not pass on things we don't know to be true, and certainly to not engender materials which are at best suspect.

I learned a lot of new information that left me both awestruck and eager to learn more. Plus, the facts in here are all great conversation starters.

For my full review, including my favorite random facts, you can click on my links below:
Blog: https://bookspoils.wordpress.com/2017/05/13/review-random-illustrated-facts-by-mike-lowery/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1998025236

A decent enough book of trivia, presented in large scale, with mostly only one factoid per page, due to the scratchy, hand-drawn illustrations and cartooning that I quite frankly could take or leave. While some of it was stating the obvious (cats have had links to witchcraft, etc) there is always someone for whom this will be their first such trivia compendium, and it's not too bad a place to start.

Excellent resource for a variety of ages. Illustrations as capturing as the text.

This gorgeous little e-book is just what is says on the cover - a stunningly illustrated short non-fiction about a section of categorised random facts including everything from animals...lots of animals, food, historical figures and many more. There were some facts that I knew and there were others that I had no idea about, for example, did you know that fish scales are added to some lipsticks to give a shimmer effect (I hope that isn't true for the lipsticks I own); also did you know that the front tiny pocket of jeans was originally used for pocket watches.

I love this little non-fiction book as it's so interesting and one of the most visually appealing books I've read this year (along with What We See In The Stars) - I'd definitely recommend it for yourself or as a quirky gift! It's not released yet, it will be available on the 31st October this year so there is a while to wait but the wait will be worth it.

I have a particularly fondness for random, useless knowledge and a recent trend of requesting these little illustrated books on Netgalley as I've been enjoying them. This one doesn't disappointment.

The facts in this book are a good mix of "things I know but were nice to see because they aren't all that common knowledge" "really really irrelevant things I didn't ever need to know" "things I've never heard of that were really fascinating that I wish were elaborated on".

This is a short, quick read. The illustrations are captivating and very well done. The facts short, and so the point, and without extra embellishment - something that others may prefer but I found irritating in certain instances.

I did overall enjoy getting to read this book though.

This is both a visual and mental delight of a book - packed from cover to cover with facts of all kinds for every reader to learn a little something, and an artistic aesthetic that helps them all pop.

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