Kate Tuttle wrote a nice article on “the story behind the new book” — This Is Improbable Too — in today’s Boston Globe. Tuttle mentions that I (the author of the book), have been at this kind of thing for a while:
Abrahams has been publishing his oddball discoveries for a quarter-century now, but his passion is nearly lifelong. “I discovered newspapers when I was really small,” he says. His hometown paper would fill extra column space with “oddball news — one I remember vividly was ‘Man Flushes Toilet, House Explodes’ — I used to cut them out and paste them into a scrapbook.” …
The book has gotten nice reviews in USA Today, and in the Wall Street Journal. And I managed, without trying or wanting to, to shock Bob Edwards near the end of our interview on The Bob Edwards show.
This Friday, September 5, I and several members of the Ig Nobel gang (Robin Abrahams, Melissa Franklin, Corky White) will do brief dramatic readings from studies that I wrote about in the book. That happens at Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge at 7 p.m. Come join us!
You can get the book from Harvard Bookstore, as well as at most other good bookstores, and also from Amazon and the other mysterious online booksellers.
My favorite, review, though was done by The Daily Mail, when the UK edition of the book was published, a few months ago. The best sentence is at the end of this paragraph:
Marc Abrahams is a researcher of research, if you can believe there’s such a thing. He reads through the vast profusion of writing churned out by academics around the world, looking for the weird and the wonderful, the wilfully obscure and the plain daft. This book collects the results of his labours in bite-sized chunks. It’s almost dementedly inconsequential.