Everything You Know About Planet Earth Is Wrong

by Matt Brown

A fascinating and humorous read that debunks the surprising myths about the world we always believed.

The latest addition to the popular Everything You Know series, this book will blow apart your beliefs in the world’s physical and social landscape, leaving you staggered by astounding facts about our planet's geography, nature, countries and cities. Indulge your curiosity and you’ll find a plethora of myths, legends and misquotes that have shaped the way we view the world today. Convinced the world is round? Think again! It’s actually flatter at the poles. Have the Sahara down as the world’s biggest desert? It’s actually Antarctica.

Brimming with facts about the world, how it works and the way we live in it, this illuminating book will guide you through the minefield of misinformation to set the record straight on everything from the location of Mexico to the correct way of measuring earthquakes. Discovering untruths about people and places, geography and the environment, Everything You Know About Planet Earth Is Wrong provides a hugely entertaining insight into the world we live in.

160 pages, Hardcover

Published January 22, 2019

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Matt Brown holds degrees in Chemistry (BSc) and Biomolecular Science (MRes). He has served as a scientific editor and writer at both Reed Elsevier and Nature Publishing Group, and has contributed to several previous science books, including Defining Moments in Science and 1001 Inventions That Changed the World (both published by Cassell). He served as the Royal Institution’s quizmaster for several years, and has also put on science quizzes for the Royal Society, Manchester Science Museum, STEMPRA, and the Hunterian Museum. Matt is also the author of London Day and Night (Batsford) and the forthcoming Everything You Know About England is Wrong (also Batsford). He serves as Editor-at-Large of Londonist.com.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the latest of a series of 'Everything You Know About... is Wrong' books from Matt Brown. Although I always feel slightly hard done by as a result of the assertion in the title, as there are certainly things here I know that aren't wrong (I mean, come on, the first corrected piece of 'knowledge' is that 'The Earth is only 6,000 years old' and I can't imagine many readers will 'know' that), it's a handy format to provide what are often surprisingly little snippets of information that are very handy for 'did you know' conversations down the pub (or showing up your parents if you're a younger reader).

Some of the incorrect statements that head each article are well-covered, if often still believed (for example, people thought that world was flat before Columbus), some are a little tricksy in the wording (such as seas have to wash up against land) and some are just pleasantly surprising (countering the idea that gold is a rare, precious metal, for example). All this is done in Brown's approachable friendly style in a book that largely takes in geography and geology.

Oddly, given I know less about geography/geology than, say, space, I found there was more here that I already knew than in Brown's equivalent book on space, however this didn't stop the book being enjoyable. Like its predecessors, it's quite a short read - you could get through the whole thing in a mid-length train journey, and the bite-sized nature mean it's ideal for reading in short bursts (loo book, anyone?)

An entertaining title and a good gift for adult or teenager alike.