#BookReview - Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Shatter Your Senses!

Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Shatter Your Senses!

By: Ripley's Believe It Or Not!
Published by: Ripley Publishing
Publication Date: August 2017
ISBN: 978-1609911782
Reviewed by: Ellen Feld
Review Date: October 3, 2017

Ripley's Believe It Or Not! has just released the 2017 edition of the annual series and it is just as fun as all the other books in the series.

Feathered Quill Book Reviews has been reviewing each new release in this series since 2009 when my then fifteen-year-old son grabbed it off my desk and spent hours going through it. Now that the 2017 edition is out, I'm the one who has spent hours reading through the book and enjoying every page.

The weird, bizarre, funny, cool, and yes, those things that make you go "ewwww," are divided into six chapters: Believe it!, World, Animals, Pop Culture, People, and Beyond Belief. These books always start out with several pages of background information - typically a bit about Robert Ripley, the man who started it all, along with some neat things he did or discovered. Next it's on to discover all the interesting things Ripley's has found to highlight this year. In the first section, Believe It!, there are oodles of cool facts such as how many dead birds, mammals, fish and plants are stored at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC; that there are people who actually suffer from a condition known as "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome"; as well as how doctors in Brazil treated severe burns by covering them with dressings made of fish skin! Of course, there are lots and lots of fantastic photos that accompany these snippets of odd facts.

The section on "Beyond Belief" will definitely be quite popular, especially with young readers as they scour the pages. A goofy picture of "The Isolator" accompanies a description of this odd 1920s mask that was used to keep the wearer focusing on only that thing directly in front of him/her. In the "World" section, there's several pictures of the Yiwa International Trade City in China that has 60,000 vendor booths within its 46 million square foot building. Burger King perfume anyone? Yup, in the "Pop Culture" section, you'll read all about how Burger King Japan sold a limited number of bottles of the fragrance for April Fool's Day, 2015.

There's so much here to look at, read about, and wonder at, that you'll be kept busy enjoying this newest edition of Ripley's Believe It Or Not! for a very long time. With a very attractive layout, as well as page after page of lavish photographs, Shatter Your Senses! will do just that. Don't miss it!

Quill says: Another year - another in the annual Ripley's Believe It Or Not! best-selling series. And like all the other volumes before it, the 2017 edition does not disappoint.