Why Girls Can't Throw - Hardcover

Symons, Mitchell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593054040 ISBN 13: 9780593054048

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2005

Synopsis

If the warning “viewer discretion is advised” makes you prick up your ears, then you’ll enjoy this quirky, funny book of answers to questions not normally asked in polite company. With its vigorous approach, it’s a book for lads, ladettes and anyone who’s ever wondered why the word “bastard” is reserved for men.

About this title

About the Author

Mitchell Symons was born in 1957 in London and educated at Mill Hill School and the LSE, where he studied just enough law to get a Third. Since leaving BBC TV, where he was a researcher and then a director, he has worked as a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He was a principal writer of early editions of the board game Trivial Pursuit and has devised many television formats. Currently he writes an award-winning weekly column for the Sunday Express.

From Publishers Weekly

The structure of Symons's genial entry in the humorous trivia genre is simple, if hardly scientific: the author thinks of a question ("Would it kill someone if you dropped a coin off the top of a skyscraper and it hit them?") and then contacts an expert, who is usually annoyed by Symons's questions (he calls many authorities more than once), for the answer (in this case, no; the coin wouldn't be moving fast enough). More often than not, Symons (That Book... of Perfectly Useless Information) eschews the specialist route and just calls up a friend who might know something; an out-of-work actor mate tells Symons why thespians won't say the name of the play Macbeth (long ago, when most towns had a theater, if a play was bombing, they'd put on an old standard like "the Scottish play," making it a harbinger of bad luck). After about 20 or 30 of these entries, the effect begins to pall, especially since many of the answers are based on dodgy anecdotal evidence. But then, this is a book designed for skipping around, and there's always something better just a few pages away—who knew, for instance, that three popes have died during sex? (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593054040
• ISBN 13: 9780593054048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 259