Take Me to Your Leader
Ian Harrison
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Buy *Take Me to Your Leader: Weird, Strange, and Totally Useless Information* by Ian Harrison online

Take Me to Your Leader: Weird, Strange, and Totally Useless Information
Ian Harrison
DK
Hardcover
360 pages
October 2007
rated 3 1/2 of 5 possible stars

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This book's loud yellow cover with shiny green bumpy polka dots has a dog dressed as Yoda on the front. It may sound peculiar, but it’s perfectly fitting for what it contains inside. Author Ian Harrison has jam-packed this 360-page book with a cornucopia of unusual tidbits and informational lists. In each chapter, the material is presented in a colorful visual way and listed under several themes, including flora and fauna, sports and leisure, food and drink, technology, communication, and Planet Earth.

Every two-page spread in this book was created to look different. "Little Soccer Horrors" from chapter 12 appear in black and white soccerball shapes. The horror movies page is written on a filmstrip background, and "Don’t Go There" contains travel information recorded on luggage tags. Photographs, illustrations, maps, and diagrams are all used on many pages to present information, as well. Photographed dolls show the native dress of many different countries including Namibia and Indonesia. Origami directions for a boat and a dollar shirt are given in easy-to-follow illustrated steps. The cost of living in different cities is shown using watches. Ian Harrison explains, “The diners pictured below are eating a good three-course restaurant meal, with watches scaled to represent the minutes they’d have to work in 2006 to pay for it, according to UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) figures.” Animal migration stories are depicted on a world map background. Looking at this map, readers can follow the Monarch butterfly, Sugar the cat, and the Toadfish symbols to see how far each animal traveled. One of the more unusual sections of the book shows photographs and recipes of super-sized foods such as the marshmallow, fish stick, pea and cookie. There are several pages not for the or and sensitive, though. One such page displays a photograph of the world’s first face transplant.

The book has seven chapters, but the chapter numbers were chosen for reasons other than their numerical order. Therefore, Chapter 9 follows Chapter 7, and Chapter 12 follows Chapter 9. The diverse collection of information in this book is easy to navigate with its useful table of contents and index pages. There are labeling mistakes on the Human Spares diagram that should be fixed if there is a reprinting.

A part-time inventor, Ian Harrison has been gathering information for many years. His books include The Book of Firsts, Where Were You When, and Book of Inventions.

Take Me to Your Leader: Weird, Strange, and Totally Useless Information does cultivate awareness for the bizarre. Readers will be surprised at some of the history, records, and stories compiled here. A good book for browsing and a fast way to pass some time, the information Harrison presents is a good introduction to the world’s more out-of-the-ordinary side.



Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Tanya Boudreau, 2007

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