Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 10/15/2011 According to the cover blurb, this large-format compendium has 1,000 wild & wacky facts & photos—and that seems pretty accurate. Ideal for browsing, each uniquely designed double-page spread features self-described awesome, eye-popping, cool, and amazing facts about a dizzying variety of topics, including sharks, houses, restaurants, baseball cards, and, well, you name it. The text is a startling mixture of fonts and sizes ranging from large headline-size sentences that fill most of a page to bite-size bits of info carefully sprinkled about. The abundant, dazzling photos also vary in size and shape, from double-page panoramic scenes to smaller shots framed in squares and circles and juxtaposed with the snippets of text. Although the information is grouped into nine chapters such as Going to Extremes, Seeing Is Believing, and Freaks of Nature, the selections feel pretty random and the result is a hodgepodge. But readers dashing from one spectacular fact to the next won’t mind. The lack of in-depth information might be frustrating to some, but it will inspire others to search further. - Copyright 2011 Booklist.