Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics, The Book

If your flatmate or partner seems a bit of a nutter at times, this book will put their petty peculiarities in perspective. Imagine living with Homer and Langley Collyer, pack-rat New Yorkers who crammed 120 tons of rubbish--including 14 pianos and a disassembled car--into their Manhattan townhouse. Think your spouse has an anal-retentive streak? Orville Wright, co-inventor of the aeroplane, "numbered the eggs that his chicken produced so he could eat them in the precise order they were laid".These and a host of other weird, wonderful and occasionally appalling personalities populate the 500 pages of The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics, the latest volume in Constable Robinson's series of "mammoth" factual compendia. Starting with an introduction in which author Karl Shaw explains the distinction between the certifiably insane and the merely eccentric, each of the book's 14 chapters surveys a different category of oddball--from "Aristocratic Eccentrics" to "Wizards of Odd"--in profiles ranging in length from a paragraph to several pages. The book also includes an "Eccentric Bibliography" (sample entry: The Romance of Leprosy by E. Mackerchar, 1949) as well as a "straight" bibliography mostly listing biographies of the more famous eccentrics profiled in the book. One unfortunate omission is the lack of an index, which would have been useful to writers and speakers in search of anecdotes about specific personalities. More of an "edutainment" title than a reference work, The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics should prove a boon companion for bathroom, bedside or on the train. It's a diverting survey of the men and women who, to paraphrase that slightly oddball philosopher Henry David Thoreau, marched to the beat of a different drummer. --C.A. WillsRead More