The Ultimate : The Great Armchair Debates Settled Once and for All

Rating:
Summary: Browser's paradise
Review: Despite not being a large book, this paperback makes a great "coffee table" book in the sense that it is great to leave laying around to have guests browse through. Flipping it open, one finds such important questions as: who's the best baseball player? which art museum is best? addressed. These are all questions that people have idled away time answering; the value Poundstone adds is having researched them. He provides just enough information--even on topics for which I don't have much expertise I found his commentary interesting. Even for those who don't care about the details the book is worth flipping through to see the comparative charts and conclusions.

Some of his choices of important questions to answer seem a bit odd (what's the most difficult shot in billiards) but even these result in a brief, interesting chapter devoted to some topic I'd never previously pondered.