- Your kids are more at risk from over-the-counter medicine than heroin.

- Drinking 6-8 glasses of water each day doesn't help you...in fact, you can kill yourself by drinking too much water.

- If you rub an onion on your head and sing "I'm A Little Teapot" while on public transportation, you will lose your bus pass for life.


Okay, I don't know if that last one's true, but it certainly should be, if it isn't.

All this data, and more, are inside this excellent book.


I heard this guy on the radio, driving home from work one day, and I was totally enthused by what he was doing: dispelling superstitions and lies is something that greatly appeals to me. I loathe ignorance, and willful stupidty is worse than child abuse, in my opinion. So I was looking forward to getting this book and seeing all the balloons he'd burst with research and documentation.

Then I found out, through Facebook, that he's married to a girl I went to high school with. What a tiny, tiny world.

He didn't work alone on this, either; his coauthor, Rachel Vreeman, is somebody I know absolutely nothing about beyond her bio in the book and some context clues in a few of the entries. She seems awfully cool, though.

I really like how they've busted the subject up into many small, easy-to-read pieces; each myth gets its own entry, and each entry is between one and two short pages (there is at least one entry that is three pages --the one about how autism is NOT caused by innoculations-- but that is the exception). It is completely accessible to even the most ignorant reader (which was probably the point), and the language is such that even a kid could probably get most of it.

That's one of the few things I thought could have been fixed slightly, though...in most academic/educational work, we don't see the word "poop" used-- in this book, it's repeated so much that I had to wonder if they were going for some sort of prize. To me, it made some of the entries a bit...childish. And it was jarring enough to take me out of the flow of reading the book a couple times.

Also, they try to make a statement, in the Afterword, along the lines of "Of course, nobody writes a book on their own..." Which is patently untrue. Lots of authors do. And even if Carroll and Vreeman are trying to include the contributions of editors and publishers and agents and family and blah, blah, blah...I have found, in my own experience, that an author writes a book in SPITE of the contributions of all those people, who mostly get in the way of the book's publication.

But these are minor shortcomings. By and large, this book is as informative as it is entertaining. And it shatters superstitions left, right, and center. That is a credit to the book, and to the authors.

So pick up a copy: it's small, inexpensive, and very readable.

That statement is not a myth.













If you dug this review, you might like my books, which you can find on Amazon, by typing "Ben Malisow" into the search bar. Enjoy!

Recommended: Yes