Wish You Knew It All? Try I Wish I Knew That: Cool Stuff You Need to Know
For many of us, there is a brief period in our lives when we know everything…then our kids become teenagers and we find out that we don’t know a thing. We may yearn for the glory days when we had an audience who knew we were the smartest, wisest, most creative people on earth—they even thought we could sing. As the kids got older, so did we, and one of the most miserable things that accompanies advanced age is the realization that we don’t know everything about everything. And the stuff we do know becomes less important every day.
Whether the subject is climate, language, literature, art, science, history, geography, or music, nobody knows everything (I never thought about it, but up until a month ago I didn’t know “so” was a conjunction!). Steve Martin (I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong--not the Steve Martin who’s a famous attorney in North Carolina), Mike Goldsmith, and Marianne Taylor have produced a neat little volume, I Wish I Knew That: Cool Stuff You Need to Know, that fills in the gaps in your education or memory with things you really should know. (If you think you are culturally literate enough, you might be interested in these tests.)
Oh, the details of the Arts and Crafts movement may not seem all that important…until you’re conversing with a group that starts talking about it, and you haven’t a clue. I Wish I Knew That tells you all you need to know to follow the conversation: “…artists…preferred objects to be simple, well-made, and handcrafted.”
Before choosing paper or plastic, it might be worth knowing that a plastic bag can take up to a thousand years to decompose. And it wouldn’t hurt if my readers knew what “hyperbole” is.
Reading I Wish I Knew That provides lots of “Aha!” moments, as the reader discovers how something works or what those people meant at the party last night. It is the kind of book that can be read in large or small doses, and it’s ideal for those times when you’ve got a few minutes to kill, although you could suddenly go from being early to being tardy as you become absorbed in its many subjects.
I Wish I Knew That should be read cover to cover for two reasons: 1) it will improve your base of knowledge, and (most importantly) 2) it’s fun. It would also be a terrific gift for that know-it-all who really doesn’t.
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