Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Non-Fiction/Trivia
Approximate word count: 15-20,000 words
Availability
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on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
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Author:
The author
of many quiz books aimed at trivia buffs, Rich Meyer’s interests are reflected
in the focus of many of those books including comic books and old time radio.
Each year Meyer and his team (dubbed “Collective Foole”) participate in the
“World’s Largest Trivia Contest,” an event put on by his hometown radio station
in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
For more,
visit Meyer’s blog. Indie author’s might also be interested in Meyer’s ebook formatting service.
Description:
500 trivia
questions spanning many pop culture subjects including sports, music, books,
TV, history, and more.
Appraisal:
Appraising
a book like this isn’t something I typically do and deciding on the correct
criteria for judging a trivia book was an interesting exercise. I concluded
there are two major areas that mattered most, the wording of the questions and
the variety of difficulty.
An ideal
trivia question will be as succinct as possible, yet specific enough so that a
reasonable person won’t be able to argue that there are multiple equally
acceptable correct answers. “He was president of the United States of America”
would be an awful question for that reason. So someone formulating a trivia
question has to sneak enough facts in their questions to make the correct
answer unambiguous. Maybe something like “He was president of the United States
of America at the beginning of the War Between the States.” That question
requires a person to know that the US Civil War is sometimes referred to as the
“War Between the States” along with who the president was when this war
started. I found the questions in areas I was familiar enough to be able to
judge were well written, both unambiguous in the correct answer and sometimes
exercising multiple bits of knowledge to be able to come up with the correct
answer. They passed my reasonable person test. (Unreasonable people, like Cliff Clavin when he competed on Jeopardy, will always be problematic.)
The other
ideal is that the questions should be diverse in difficulty. The Pop Culture Quiz Book seemed to hit
a nice balance in this regard, too. The book was arranged in sections with
questions in a related area grouped together. I found that the areas I knew I
was weak, comic books and comic strips being one, were areas I did poorly as
expected, but was still able to answer some questions correctly. Those areas
where I knew I was relatively strong, music and books for example, I did well,
yet found plenty of questions I struggled with and couldn’t come up with the
correct answer. I was surprised to discover I’d absorbed more sports trivia
through the years than I would have guessed as well, a category it wouldn’t
have surprised me to have done poorly in.
I liked how
the book was arranged with the question, then the answer following, with the
spacing such that you would never see the correct answer until you had
formulated your response and chose to page forward to compare. This immediate
feedback is great. But short of keeping track on paper, a reader isn’t going to
know their “score” (exactly how many answers did I get right?) This realization
didn’t strike me until I was well into the questions. For those interested in
how many questions they got right, using the Kindle notes capability to record
something simple (maybe ‘Y’ or ‘N” for yes I got it right or no, I didn’t)
would make it trivial to figure out how well they did after the fact. I only wish I’d thought of that in advance.
Format/Typo Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating: **** Four stars
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