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Einstein's Refrigerator and Other Stories from Flip Side Of

Average customer rating:

Truth is stranger than fiction...
Round Up the Usual Oddities: Useful for the Novice
a great book with interesting short stories
Mr. Silver is the very much best teacher ever.
The Flip Side of Urban Legends

Einstein's Refrigerator and Other Stories from Flip Side Of
Steve Silverman
Manufacturer: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0740714198

Book Description

Steve Silverman was looking for a way to add some spice to his high school lectures when he realized that weird and bizarre true-life stories would capture his students' attention. In fact, they worked so well that the science teacher then began posting his discoveries to his own Web site, which he dubbed Useless Information. Well-researched and clearly sourced, Silverman's unusual tidbits have gained a wide following.In Einstein's Refrigerator, Silverman collects more than 30 of the most fascinating stories he has gathered-tales of forgotten genius, great blunders, and incredible feats of survival, as well as answers to puzzling questions. Einstein's Refrigerator is a remarkable book with spellbinding stories. Whatever happened to the refrigerator Einstein helped invent? While it never became a commercial success, its underlying concepts became the basis for cooling nuclear breeder reactors.

Customer Reviews:

Truth is stranger than fiction..........2005-07-31

I have enjoyed reading this sort of stuff ever since I was a kid and that's 60 years ago.This book is a bunch of short articles about people and things that have happened in somewhat recent history ,which will never appear in history textbooks,but very interesting nonetheless. If you read some of the other reviews,you'll see what some of these things are.There are about 30 weird items covered in the book.So,no need for me to repeat.
The interesting thing to someone like me who has enjoyed this sort of thing is what has changed so much by the people who dig up and publish this stuff.
I first got interested in this trivia by reading Ripley's Believe It or Not!.His cartoons were a daily and weekly sort of thing in newspapers and read by just about everyone.He was the real inventor of this popular interest;that is he more than anyone else ,made it so popular.He travelled the world searching out the unbelievable,and because of that he was known as "The Modern Day Marco Polo".I have several dozen of his books and there are many Ripley museums and now even TV shows.Ripley was one of the most well known people and most interesting characters in the western world.There were many others who published similar stuff ;but none even came close to the 'master'.
A couple of things are interesting about this book.First ,the author is a relatively unknown and in no sense the 'bigger than life character' that Ripley was.Ripley had to travel the globe or depend on people to send him material.No need to do that anymore.A person needs only access to the net ,and away he goes.If you read something in Ripley,s,that would be about the end of it.Further information would be very diffult to come by,especially if one lived in a small town.With the sories in this book the author gives a lot of references which would lead one on to many ,many more, all from your desk and the net.
The author has a terrific web site 'Steve Silverman's Useless Information'jam-packed with similar stories.Oh,by the way,even though your local newspaper probably no longer carries the Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoons ,there is an excellent Ripley's Website that does.
I am glad someone still publishes this stuff as I've had a ton of enjoyment over the years reading ;Stranger than Fiction,Greatest Inventions,World's Biggest Blunders,Weird but True,Did you Know?,World's Dumbest Inventions,World's dumbest Criminals,World's strangest Places,and on and on. However,Silverman has shown how the Net has made the amount of this information that is available,virtually limitless.
As with everything,when something new comes along, something old disappears.
With me,it's the characters like Ripley who are becoming the thing of the past,and I believe we are all a little poorer for it.

Round Up the Usual Oddities: Useful for the Novice.......2004-01-24

This book would make an excellent introduction to those new to the field, but aficionados in trivia, historical curiosities, and other such lore are unlikely to find much here that they haven't read about elsewhere. Although the material is amusing in itself, this book is marred by two things. First of all, there are numerous factual blunders of an elementary nature (e.g. identifying "Wasser" as a Greek word) and a book like this obviously should be factually impeccable.

Secondly, Silverman's prose style is somewhat annoying. It is not hard to believe that his original audience was high school students. His efforts at wit are clearly tailored for a juvenile audience and occasionally make one wince with irritation (worst of all is his habit of ending every single chapter with the refrain "Useless? Useful? I'll leave that for you to decide.")

Jejune prose and puerile cracks are certainly the banes of this genre, as anyone with broad experience in trivia knows. In this way, Silverman isn't much different. Probably the best exception to this rule is Cecil Adams (_The Straight Dope_, q.v.), one of the pioneers of modern trivia writing. He writes for a more sophisticated (if not necessarily mature) audience, and his jokes are actually funny.

a great book with interesting short stories.......2003-12-05

my brother passed this book on to me when he left for college, and i carelessly threw it on a shelf. then one day i picked it up and i was fascinated! it has so many interesting and true stories. i couldnt believe that i had let it sit on a shlef for so many months. just to give you a bit of the flavor of the book, heres some of the articles names (and they are as interesting as they sound!!) - the great boston molasses tragedy, mike the headless chicken, bat bombs, the baby derby - just to name a few! since reading it, i have lent it out to many of my friends, and they all agree that it is a great book.

Mr. Silver is the very much best teacher ever........2003-06-02

I am exchange student, and I have mr silverman as my teacher of science in the 11th grade. He taght me that quarks come from a mommy and daddy, and that einstein liked to cook stuff and keep it cold. This book helped me learn to read better, with mr. silverman by my side the whole of the way.

Mr. silverman is also single and looking, ladies.

The Flip Side of Urban Legends.......2002-01-04

Everyone has heard of urban legends, those absolutly true accounts of apocryphal events which are truer with every telling. Usually, they represent an exaggeration, a fabrication or an outright hoax. In Einstein's Refrigerator, author Silverman serves up a host of stories collected from his Useless Information web site that sound much like urban legens, but aren't; each is absolutely true and substantiated. Ever hear the one about the guy who attached helium balloons to a lawn chair, then used a rifle to pop the balloons one by one to descend? Really happened! Or the one about the salvage company that raised a sunken ship by filling it with millions of ping-pong balls, inspired by a Donald Duck comic book? Also happened! The volume suffers though from a lack of cohesion; it is less a book than a collection of anecdotes. As a collection of conversation-starters or bet-settlers the book is at least as good as the compilations of urban legends from Thomas J. Craughwell and others and a pleasant diversion for those odd moments of down time.

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