Albert JackReviews

Interesting but also frustrating conflation of some genuine food history and lots of apocryphal 'some people say' stories. The author mostly fails to differentiate between factual information and inaccurate food mythology. This is mostly because the book is lacking in citations or references to any sources for the 'facts' we are being given, so the reader is unable to verify or follow up on anything. Unfortunately, it's exactly this type of work that tends to perpetuate historical inaccuracies and misconceptions rather than clear them up.

Enjoyable potpourri of food facts: the origin of dishes and recipes, sorting myth from fact.½

A wonderful reference book giving the meanings behind so many of the phrases we use every day, and some that have gone out of fashion.

What we think of as rhymes for children, were really the political cartoons of their day.
Many of them refer to actual events.

I write quite often on TripAdvisor and many of my reviews (this will come as a surprise to few) are about pubs. To add a little more substance to the levity of the general text, this book is a good reference source, especially about the generic name of certain pubs.
There is an extended index in the back, listing all the place names, people, events and other relevant mentions in the book and noting the pages where these mentions can be found - they would be much easier to look up however, if the pages themselves were numbered.

I have bought this before, and wrote the review that went -

'A brilliant book for those interested in the origin of public house nomenclature. It includes unusual stories behind the names such as 'The Nags Head' and its corsair connection. 'The Royal Oak' has an English Civil War reference and why 'The Bishops Finger' points it's way to a shrine. Stories about Robin Hood, royal mistresses, pagan rituals, cricket and cholera are all included. A totally engaging read - worth keeping in the loo, or taking down to the pub'

And taken it down the pub I must have done because I've had to buy it again - not being able to find the original purchase in the loo or anywhere else.

A brilliant book for those interested in the origin of public house.

'The bizarre and brilliant stories behind our favourite dishes'
By sally tarbox on 15 September 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Mildly interesting selection of food facts. Foods named after celebs, chefs, famous events... Etymology of 'food based' phrases - worth his salt, cheesed off etc. And the history of foodstuffs from the introduction of the potato to the 'British balti.'
Good book to browse through.

The origins of even more phrases we use every day

I read this one over the course of a single day home sick from work. It is lots of fun and quite informative. I feared that the author might put forth the theories of the rhymes as fact but he did not; he was very fair and balanced and simply presented the best and most interesting theories, understanding that the true origins of most of the verses are lost in the mists of time. This was an enjoyable read.

I've been reading this on and off in the bathroom for a year or two now. It's interesting. A bunch of the phrases are either from out the US or I just haven't heard them used before, so I skipped those. Really this is the kind of "information" that make good conversation starters. Like when someone says, "Here's mud in your eye." and you say, "Did you know that phrase actually came from..." Then you sound all smart and women swoon, and guys think your a pretentious ass, or maybe just everybody thinks your a pretentious ass. Actually though, if people already know you (whether your an ass or not), they might actually think it's interesting stuff.

Makes a great bathroom book because the entries are short.

Quick read. More of a bathroom book. Not too many solutions, but he's probably right about the Lock Ness monster.

This book is interesting and fun to read. The explanations he gives for some of the mysteries are reasonable and make sense. I borrowed this from my library but it is available on Amazon. I will be checking out his other books also.

Interesting book filled with fun food facts.

Rating: 2.5 of 5

Only recommended to newbies with little to no previous experience with urban legends in their oral, written, or cinematic forms. I thought this would have more backstory behind the tales (based on the book's title) but it was merely a collection of the most well-known urban legends in pop culture. Each tale was super short, and every once in a while there'd be some context thrown in, or a "this could be true" narrative. Overall, it was just too dry for me.½

Get ready for a wild ride.

Nursery rhymes often mean more than we realize, and there is an honorable tradition of collecting them and trying to figure out what they mean. Some of these books -- notably Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes -- are excellent pieces of scholarship. Some -- like the word of Katherine Elwes Thomas -- are closer to drug dreams.

This book is somewhere in the middle, but leaning toward the wild side. Take "Jack Sprat." Jack-the-author suggests that this was inspired by the reign of King Richard the Lion-hearted, who was imprisoned in Austria, forcing the English to scrape up a huge ransom -- i.e. to "lick the platter clean." This is historical enough, and England was indeed scraped bare to get back their hard-fighting nitwit of a king. But Richard I was king from 1189 to 1199 -- the early Plantagenet period. Richard -- who spend only six months of his reign in England -- spoke no English, and even if he had, the English of the time was early Middle English, not Modern English. "Jack Spratt" could not have been composed in Middle English.

So there is a lot of material here that is purely speculative or, in some cases, wrong. Of course, some of it is right as well. It's not a bad book; it simply needs to be controlled. The Opie book would be a good start. But this is a lot cheaper....

Somewhat Interesting, but filled with a ton of British nursery rhymes I'd never heard of before. Also the author makes it clear that there is no way to know for sure the meaning of any of these rhymes - he just gives possibilities and tells you which is his favorite.

An interesting and often amusing collection of the origins of everyday phrases like 'bluestocking' or 'bought the farm', marred only by the writer's numerous jibes at marriage.

Jack is a member of father's for justice and that's an organisation I'm sympathetic towards, but he assumes all marriages are like his own, and, as a happily married person for the last thirty years, I find that irritating when I hit yet another jibe at wives or marriage.½

The premise of this book is fabulous. I'd love to know more about the history of nursery rhymes. However, practically every entry in this book is speculation on the part of the author. There are few hard facts. I appreciate that it's hard to identify the sources of many rhymes, but I won't want to read four pages of wild guesses for each rhyme. If I want fiction, I'll go read fiction. Did not like this.

This is not perhaps the most reliable book I have read but it is engaging and amusingly written, with a wealth of easily-digestible information and humorous asides that make it ideal reading matter for a waiting room, and a good way to introduce teenagers to some of the more dated popular mysteries.

The cover title is inaccurate because the book does not explain the world's secrets - although generally a reasonable hypothesis is given - and we still don't know what happened to Kaspar Hauser or the truth behind the Dover Monster; but several myths [eg Bigfoot, Crop Circles, the Cottingsley fairies, Agatha Christie, the Aurora space ship] are completely explored and exploded.

The most disappointing chapter by far is that dealing with the Loch Ness Monster which contains such a glaring omission of fact as to cast doubt on the reliability of the rest of the book: Jack puts forward several hypotheses to explain away the best known photograph of the monster, the so-called 'Surgeon's photograph', including unlikely scenarios involving partially submerged circus elephants. The truth, as admitted by the author of the image many years later, is that the picture was a forgery, consisting of a piece of rubber piping, a toy submarine and a pond at the bottom of the garden.

This and other quibbles aside, Ten Minute Mysteries is a compulsively readable book, entertianing and informative, and with rather nice illustrations to boot. I had not heard of Mr Jack before - depite all the time he seems to spend in South Africa - but I shall be looking out for his books in future.

sounds more interesting than it is. I learned a few things but also found some of the research to be less than stellar.½

All those urban myths and stories you've heard for years, now gathered in one volume. Great for lifting the spirits when a quick dose of laughter is required

Very UK.