Barrett Erin

Amuse your date, impress your boss, bore your kids, or be the 6th caller to win a pair of tickets to the nose-flute band concert all because you've read this latest trivia romp through history, politics, religion, and science by the dyno-duo Barret and Mingo.

A guide full of great advice for living a richly rewarding life, this handbook is a 21st-century version of Ben Franklin's "The Way of Wealth."

From devastating remarks made by teachers (Addled, backward dunce said about young Thomas Edison) to the rich and famous on campus (William Randolph Hearst kept a pet alligator at Harvard), this is a spirited and humorous collection of facts about teachers and students.

Golfers consumed with the details of the game — isn't that all golfers? — will delight in this collection featuring more than 500 facts about the sport that Paul Harvey describes as "a game in which you shout 'fore,' shoot six, and write down five." Readers learn that experts believe shepherds invented the game using their staffs to bat around stones and that 12 percent of all lightning fatalities happen on the golf course.

It's no joke that we are all fascinated by the medical profession and the people in it. With Doctors Killed George Washington, trivia mavens Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo explore accidental medical discoveries, medical follies, bizarre cures, and more. This titillating tome puts doctors and medical history under the microscope and exposes more than 500 little-known facts and outrageous oddities from the wild world of medicine. Did you know? Before the advent of surgery, ancient Egyptian doctors put their patients under by hitting them on the head with a mallet.

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo score again with a collection of over 500 fascinating facts and trivia bits about lawyers, organized into topics such as Judge Not, Unless Ye Be a Judge, I Fought the Law and the Law Won, Fightin' Words, and Money Grubbing. Among the tidbits contained here are: one-time lawyers who went on to other jobs including John Cleese, Mahatma Gandhi, Julio Iglesias, and Geraldo Rivera; two-thirds of U.S. presidents have been lawyers, but not Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, or Harry Truman — they dropped out of law school; the number of lawyers in the U.S. doubled between 1970 and 1985 — now more than 65 percent of the world's lawyers are in the U.S.