Trivial pursuits

Book review of Stuff you should know: An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things

Curiosity, says the popular proverb, killed the cat. But it is also among the prime motivators for learning. Once a person has finished his formal education, he can embark on a lifelong, freewheeling quest for knowledge. Today, he can buy the best books on any subject online or view YouTube interviews where the finest minds freely dispense their hard-earned wisdom. And then there are short-term, online courses on every conceivable subject, many from the world’s top universities. To paraphrase Wordsworth, for the enquiring spirit, it is indeed bliss in this dawn to be alive.

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant have created an enterprise out of their urge to satiate their curiosity. They have been hosting a podcast called “Stuff You Should Know”, which has enjoyed an incredible run of more than 1,300 episodes since 2008. Now they have written a book of the same name. 

The core belief that underpins their work is that there is something interesting about everything. Their goal, they say, is to teach people as much about the world as they can, one subject at a time.

 The most endearing aspect of this book is the quirky choice of topics. One, for instance, is the business of getting lost. Apparently, this is not as uncommon as we may imagine. It happens all the time, especially within large national parks. What is interesting is that when lost, irrespective of age, gender, race, or nationality, people adopt similar strategies. They resort to random travelling (go this way and that), route travelling (follow a path in the forest), direction travelling (go in one cardinal direction), and so on. The strategy that offers the highest probability of being discovered is to stay at one place. As the authors put it, the only thing more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack is finding one that keeps moving. Alas, almost no one follows it. The propensity to act in the face of danger becomes their worst enemy.  

Readers who are keen on military strategy will love the chapter titled “Kamikaze”. Most of us have heard of Japanese Kamikaze pilots who rammed their planes into Allied aircraft carriers during World War II. What most of us wouldn’t know is that the word originated much earlier. In the 13th century, Kublai Khan,  Genghis Khan’s grandson, sent several fleets to subjugate Japan. Each time his army was about to land, a typhoon destroyed his fleet. This coincidence occurred no less than three times. The Japanese then gave this typhoon a name —Kamikaze or the divine wind.

Stuff you should know: An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things

Author: Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant with Nils Parker

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 286; Price: Rs 699

Towards the end of World War II, as the Japanese air force lost its best planes and experienced pilots, it settled on Kamikaze as a strategy. Young pilots were put into gliders and ordered to ram them into American carriers. When defeat was inevitable, Japanese army units also launched “banzai” charges—frontal, suicidal attacks aimed at killing as many enemy soldiers as one could before getting killed.

Most rational minds would find such suicidal tactics repellent. The Japanese, however, were game to follow them because their genesis lay in their age-old code of bushido,  or the warrior way, wherein death is deemed more honourable than surrender.

Music lovers will love the chapter on roadies. This term refers not to bikers, as many of us think, but to the crew that works for a music band. They are the people who handle all the grunt work of setting up tonnes of equipment, then dismantling it once a show ends, and hauling it to the next destination. They work long hours, sleep in cheap hotels, and travel in cramped vehicles. Why do they put up with such a life? Mostly because they are music buffs. Taking up such work allows them to live in proximity to the stars they adore. And sometimes, very rarely of course, some of them manage to step into the shoes of an indisposed band member and become musical legends themselves.    

From the profound to the banal to the ridiculous, the reader will find all sorts of stories here. There is one on the invention of the Murphy bed. The inventor had only one room in his house and Victorian norms did not allow him to court his lady love in his bedroom. By devising a bed that disappeared into his cupboard, he was able to convert his bedroom into a parlour, and thus meet the norms of respectability.

What makes these stories soar is the painstaking research and the good writing that has gone into them. If you are looking for an antidote to the cold weather outside, curl up within a blanket with this book. You are bound to have your curiosity satisfied about any number of things — and have a lot of fun too.