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QI: The Book of Animal Ignorance


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Editorial
Book Description

A bestiary for the 21st century from the writers of the hit BBC show 'QI'.

Editorial
Synopsis

Join the QI team for an off-road safari through a hundred of the most interesting members of the animal kingdom, armed with illuminating illustrations and diagrams by award-winning artist Ted Dewan. Meet the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom. Marvel at elephants that walk on tiptoe, pigs that shine in the dark, and woodpeckers that have ears on the end of their tongues. If you still think a pangolin is a musical instrument, that hyenas are dogs, or that sheep are pointless and stupid, "The Book of Animal Ignorance" has arrived just in time.
Editorial
From the Publisher

Includes a Foreword by Stephen Fry, and a Forepaw by Alan Davies.

Editorial
From the Author

Hello, Lloyd & Mitchinson here. In case you hadn't spotted it, this is the second QI book, designed to fit snugly next to The Book of General Ignorance.

What is it? It's about animals and how little we know about them. It paints a picture of an unfamiliar world in which elephants can't run, geese mourn their dead, koalas don't drink, leeches have 34 brains, lobsters live for a century, mice sing while having sex, monkeys pay to look at porn, spiders can fly, termites mate for life and worms get addicted to nicotine. It will make you look at our furred- feathered-scaled-creepy-crawly-slimy-wiggly, friends with new-found respect.

Almost none of this material has appeared on the QI TV show before. And, better still, it features 400 diagrams and cartoons by the brilliant Ted Dewan: artist, author, polymath and engineer (we nearly called it The Book of Animal Engineering) plus a Foreword by Stephen Fry (see Treasures, National) and a Forepaw by Alan Davies (see Animals, Best impressions of).

As Mr Fry so elegantly puts it: 'Animals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub...'

Editorial
About the Author

John Lloyd is the founder of QI and the producer of some of Britain's best-loved TV shows. He lives with several cats, four mice and a tub of well-endowed brine shrimps.

John Mitchinson is Director of Research for QI and shares his life with pigs, chickens and a rather malodorous animal who answers to the name of `Mr Ferret'.

Ted Dewan is possibly the UK's only cult children's author and illustrator. He keeps no livestock but did invent Crispin the Pig Who Had It All and Bing Bunny.

Editorial
Excerpted from QI: The Book of Animal Ignorance by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson. Copyright © 2007. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOREWORD by Stephen Fry:

Animals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub. If you cannot be entranced, amused and astonished by the animal kingdom then QI has no use for you nor you, no doubt, for us.

Animals have this in common with each other: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn't wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree-frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane-fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree-frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well . . . we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be - Home sapiens.

There is much to be learned from the animals. Much to be learned about them, of course, but much, much more to be learned about ourselves: our limits, our lonely uniqueness as a species and, I would add, our greatness. The fact that we care with unreciprocated fervour about woodlice, woodpeckers and wolverines is to our credit. I cannot subscribe to this modern idea that we should feel guilty about our role on earth, or inferior for having evolved a (self-) conscious mind. This is just Genesis wrapped up in new, even more sanctimonious clothes. The old religion and the new orthodoxy both claim we have guardianship over the earth and a `moral' responsibility for its destiny. Well, fine. But I will not apologise for committing the crime of being born any more than a marmot or a mosquito should. And between them, those two have been responsible for more death and upheaval than all human wars.

In the end, whatever weird and unfathomable purposes there might be to existence, to whichever theory of the development of life you might subscribe, we all have to face the fact that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for the oddities and extremities of the zoological world. Nothing in nature seems to follow a fixed predictable law, not the number of penises on an insect, not the need for a chicken to have a head. I suppose they all have in common the melancholy fact that they have been impersonated with the use of nothing more than a mop of hair, expressive hands and a pair of big brown eyes, by Mr Alan Davies.


Fabulous
Review date: 2008-01-22 Rating: 8 out of 10

Fabulous fabulous fabulous fabulous fabulous book. Fabulous. Ideal for reading to your other half when lying in bed after an overly heavy meal.

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Reviews


Animals or Robots?!
Review date: 2007-11-20 Rating: 10 out of 10

Thanks, Jon, for getting me onto Peter Cave's Robots as well as Stephen Fry's Animals. Both books were great and very good for the enquiring mind. Thoroughly recommended.

Animal Thoughts move on!
Review date: 2007-11-16 Rating: 8 out of 10



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 really get your cells working buy the two! Both are extremely readable and remind you that using your brain can be fun!

Far more interesting and far funnier than the first book
Review date: 2007-11-12 Rating: 10 out of 10

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 and 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 and answer style of the book of general ignorance. Instead it has been organised into two-page sections, each concerning one of 100 animals, organised alphabetically. Hence the focus has drifted away from the ignorance and 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 and how natural selection produced some of the stranger animals in the book. This makes for some interesting discussion, especially 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 and their reproductive organs is something this book doesn't shy away from. It certainly makes for intriguing discussion. Both men and women will find that this book will create feelings of varying degrees of supremacy and 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 and 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) and an introduction by the authors John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. All three are well worth reading and avoid skipping straight into the main text. As they explain, QI is as much a philosophy as a TV show and animals are the bread and butter of interestingness. A quote from Henry Beston in the book:

"In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time."

The amazing illustrations, the tireless research by the elves and the philosophy of QI have combined to create an excellent book. You can dip into it and 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 and wallow with us for a while".

Quite interesting
Review date: 2007-11-06 Rating: 8 out of 10

Good old Stephen Fry and his cohorts have come up with an eminently readable book about the many things we think we know about animals but have actually 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 really want to learn about wildlife, try Johnson P Johnson's 'The Armchair Naturalist' - an excellent (and fun) beginner's guide.

Product Details/Specifications


Authors:
John Lloyd
John Mitchinson

Creators:
Stephen Fry (Foreword)

Recording label: Faber and Faber
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
EAN: 9780571233700
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 0571233708
Number of pages: 304
Publication date: 2007-10-04
Language: English (Unknown)
Language: English (Original Language)

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