Ian Harrison: 'Earth - A Visitor’s Guide'

Apparently, visitors to earth like squiggly, hard-to-read fonts, articles on dogs in costumes, and misshapen neon graphics. These aliens are hardcore observers of life who want it blasted into their brains without any pesky context, fact-checking, organisation, or relevance.

From Air Force One to the colorful coffins of Ghana, there are over 300 pages of interesting tidbits and trivia. Unfortunately, it’s presented with all the scholarship and confidence of a tabloid newspaper. If you spell-check your term papers with the Urban Dictionary, you’ll feel a sense of familiar comfort digging into these chapters. For example, the “cursed inheritance” that fueled the Winchester Mystery House, the 160-room mansion built by the Winchester (rifle) heiress over the course of 38 years until her death, mixes fact (she spent $5.5 million) and possible fiction (she built it on the advice that it would ward off evil spirits). Both, fact and fiction, however, are given the same apparent weight, so it’s impossible to distinguish between the two, and makes the first appear less likely. The more incredible “facts” really need a citation so that the reader can check the information, or get at least the smallest assurance that this book wasn’t simply printed off of the Internet.

Chapters skip from three to seven (and also to nine and to twelve) because, according to a note in the table of contents, the author considered numbers four, five and six (and eight, ten, and eleven) to be less interesting. The very set up, that every page is a different topic completely unrelated to the one before it, makes it a bathroom reader. There’s not anywhere else I’d be particularly interested in thumbing through the photos of unsuspecting cats whose owners have dyed them with spots and stripes, and somehow, it seems thematically appropriate.

Published 4th October 2007 by Dorling Kindersley.

Written by W. L. Clark.