Why Girls Can't Throw: ...and Other Questions You Always Wanted Answered – Shocking Truths and Quirky Facts About the Universe, Human Body, and Everyday Life
the truth can be shocking, seductive, offensive, outrageous...even disgusting! Are you perplexed by the mysteries of the universe, confounded by the workings of the human body, prone to pondering the great imponderables? At long last, the answers are here for every inquiring mind that's not afraid to face up to the cold, hard facts of life. The author who brought you That Book . . . of Perfectly Useless Information now addresses the quirky, the eclectic, and the essential conundrums of our age in Why Girls Can't Throw . . . and Other Questions You Always Wanted Answered ,
On some level, I have to agree with the people who say that this book isn't the best researched or it isn't academic. But it is definitely humorous & it has a good amount of trivia. If you borrow it just for the humor & the trivia, you will absolutely love this book. (I ended up borrowing the book from the library because some jackass dad posted about the book on Facebook & complaining about the sexual content. If you're someone worried about that, the book is a trivia book - it's mostly not about sex related questions. If you're a petty person, like I can be at times, hey! Piss off a bigot! There's sex in this book! Along with everything else. Lol.)
This book gets bonus points for humor, but falls a bit short on authoritativeness. Enough of the explanations in here I've encountered elsewhere from sturdier sources that I'm willing to go on a limb and say the author isn't completely making it up as he goes along. Still, he almost goes out of his way to appear that way, cheerfully admitting to gleaning his findings from "experts" ranging from alleged professionals in various scientific fields, to his young son, and a range of schlubby acquaintances. I suspect this is more for the comedic value than to cover his rear. Fortunately for everyone he does succeed in that respect and in several cases, the journey to get to the root of an answer is more satisfying (and funny) than the result. The research behind the title predicament "why girls can't throw" for example, was incredibly unscientific and yet I can't deny feeling a little bit pleased afterwards all the same.
If you're one of those guys who expects to have tenable high ground to stand on as you're spouting off little known facts and debunking commonly held misconceptions to your friends, this is not the book for you. However, if you think those people take themselves way too seriously, you'll likely enjoy this.
Goddamn I love trivia. This book is all about silly things we've heard, and the author sets out, rather unscientifically, to find what truth (if any) is in them.
For the record, he never establishes WHY, but by his tests, on average men CAN throw farther than women, although the longest single throw in his test was from a woman.