Armchair Reader: The Mammoth Reader

Stuff your brain with conversation starters, cultural tidbits, and important and not so important knowledge about the world. Armchair Reader: The Mammoth Reader entertains and enlightens with little-known anecdotes, fascinating trivia, off-the-wall facts, offbeat lists, and smarty-pants humor. Find nuggets of information about a wide array of topics, including science, celebrities, art, animals, food, history, sports, and just plain old weird stuff.

Learn what it takes to become a butler, what chili pepper and morphine have in common, and what color underwear Major League Baseball umpires have to wear. Armchair Reader: The Mammoth Reader provides 576 pages of information on topics as varied as the marvels of science and pop culture trivia. Here is a sampling of what s inside book:
President Andrew Jackson s inauguration was so completely out of hand that a mob of partiers trashed the White House.
Some famous folks were serious hypochondriacs, including Charles Darwin and Tennessee Williams.
In baseball s early days, umpires sat in rocking chairs behind home plate.
Famed nurse Florence Nightingale carried a pet owl in her pocket.
When Marvel Comics published a comic book featuring the rock band KISS in 1977, a sample of blood from each band member was mixed into the ink at the printing plant.