The Why Files is a collection of about 20% of articles originally posted on The Why Files website, and about 80% new material. The Why Files was established in 1996 in Madison, Wisconsin with a grant by the National Science Foundation. Why I have never been to the website before is beyond me, because it's clearly an inventive and fun website to visit.
Contents of The Why Files
The Why Files book consists of 15 chapters, chapters which cover things like business life, and food, and style and arts, and travel, and health. Each chapter is made up of between four and ten 500-word essays on more or less related topics.
For example, the chapter called "Sports" includes an article on why race horse shoppers look for good rear ends, how the curve ball works, why exercise addicts get in the groove, how honeybees have teams, how dinosaurs swam, and how the delicate balance between steroid doping drugs and methods for testing for steroids continues to be maintained. Pretty cool, huh?
A Little Bit about a Lot of Things
In The Why Files you'll find a little bit about a broad range of topics, including archaeology (phew!). There's an article on how writing was invented by CPAs, and one on how long humans have been using urine testing, and one on how we know what color woolly mammoth hair was and what ice cores are trying to tell us and one on chili pepper domestication in Peru.
But in the main, The Why Files is just a hodgepodge of fun articles on science issues taken from the daily newspaper and explained. Just great stuff.
Layout of The Why Files
The book is very attractively laid out. The cover looks a bit like a tabloid newspaper, and the paper is thick and gray, something like the paper they used to give us in 3rd grade to write on. The binding is loose enough to be comfortable left open on the arm of your easy chair without doing damage to either the chair or the book. The publicity doesn't say whether the book is printed on recycled or acid-free paper, so I assume it isn't; but it is definitely fun and interesting to hold and dip into.
Bottom Line
In short, The Why Files is a fun book to have lying around for those odd hours when you just want to tickle your brain for a few minutes.
The book is available on PriceGrabber (see the "compare prices" button) for as little as $7 and at the most $15; an extremely great deal for anybody looking for an entertaining time.
