Customer Reviews
Fabulous - By: Supertad, 22 Jan 2008 
Fabulous fabulous fabulous fabulous fabulous book. Fabulous. Ideal for reading to your other half when lying in bed after an overly heavy meal.
Animals or Robots?! - By: Cathy, 20 Nov 2007 
Thanks, Jon, for getting me onto Peter Cave's Robots as well as Stephen Fry's Animals. Both books were great & very good for the enquiring mind. Thoroughly recommended.
Animal Thoughts move on! - By: Jon, 16 Nov 2007 I did enjoy Stephen Fry's book which certainly got me thinking.
However, something which has done so even more recently is Peter Cave's Can a Robot be Human. If you want to reallly get your cells working buy the two! Both are extremely readable & remind you that using your brain can be fun!
Far more interesting and far funnier than the first book - By: grizzly, 12 Nov 2007 The Book of Animal Ignorance is quite different from its predecessor, the Book of General Ignorance. The few people that disliked the first QI book complained that its question & answer style made them feel stupid (although the fact that so many people bought it seems to suggest that people quite enjoyed this). You won't get that feeling when reading the latest edition from the QI team.
The book has lost the question & answer style of the book of general ignorance. Instead it has been organised into two-page sections, each concerning one of 100 animals, organised alphabeticallly. Hence the focus has drifted away from the ignorance & over to the animal. However, that does not mean that the book is any less interesting.
For someone who religiously watches the TV show which the book accompanies, this book is far more rewarding. The first book lifted much of its material from the general ignorance round in the show. That which hadn't been seen by viewers of the show, probably hadn't made the cut. For this book it is clear that a considerable amount of extra research has been done.
Since much of the research has been done exclusively for the book, you can begin to perceive some of the themes that preoccupied the authors & their elves. The etymology of animal names is a clear example. Understanding how an animal was named gives a fascinating insight into what we believed we knew about the animal in the past & how our relationship with it has changed. The mouse is an excellent example:
"The very name `mouse' ultimately derives from the Sanskrit root mush, which means mouse & also to steal. Hence wherever we went thereafter - on foot, in carts, or by ship - the little thief kept us company."
There's also a very strong focus on evolution & how natural selection produced some of the stranger animals in the book. This makes for some interesting discussion, especiallly for those animals that have existed in isolation for so long.
If the book makes a reference to barbs, spines, nails or unfolding like a Swiss army knife then something about male genitalia is probably about to follow. The topic of animal reproduction & their reproductive organs is something this book doesn't shy away from. It certainly makes for intriguing discussion. Both men & women will find that this book will create feelings of varying degrees of supremacy & inadequacy. However, one must disagree with the claim that "if the Nine-banded armadillo were human its penis would be 4 feet long". If it were human then it would have a human sized penis.
Accompanying the section on each animal is at least one picture drawn by Ted Dewan. Reading a book as interesting as this, it would be easy to rush onto read about the next animal without glancing at these excellent illustrations. Don't! These pictures don't just illustrate what is described in the text but also include some of the most interesting pieces of information in the book. They range from mechanical drawings (Ted Dewan trained as an engineer) to illustrate an owl's ability to move its head around 360 degrees, to the life-like drawing of a catfish. Some will set you laughing out loud like the sketch of a brown bear wandering around a supermarket. Also, don't miss the extra facts & quotes in the grey boxes. The best one accompanies the section about humans.
"Human beings, who are unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so" Douglas Adams.
The book includes at its start a foreword by Stephen Fry, a `forepaw' by Alan Davies (which is far bigger than his contribution to the first book) & an introduction by the authors John Lloyd & John Mitchinson. All three are well worth reading & avoid skipping straight into the main text. As they explain, QI is as much a philosophy as a TV show & animals are the bread & butter of interestingness. A quote from Henry Beston in the book:
"In a world older & more complex than ours, they move finished & complete, gifted with the extension of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shalll never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life & time."
The amazing illustrations, the tireless research by the elves & the philosophy of QI have combined to create an excellent book. You can dip into it & be confident that you will always be rewarded with something you didn't know. I sincerely suggest that you take up the author's invitation to "come down to the waterhole of ignorance & walllow with us for a while".
Quite interesting - By: Natureboy, 06 Nov 2007 Good old Stephen Fry & his cohorts have come up with an eminently readable book about the many things we think we know about animals but have actuallly got wrong or not quite as right as we thought. It's in the usual QI format so if you enjoy the television programme you'll probably like this. However, as I have mentioned in a review elsewhere, if you reallly want to learn about wildlife, try Johnson P Johnson's 'The Armchair Naturalist' - an excellent (and fun) beginner's guide.
