Spark creativity with Ripley’s fascinating facts

This school year your child will be the fastest hand-raiser in the entire school thanks to “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Reality Shock!”

Robert Ripley liked to travel and he liked weird, unusual things. Nowhere was too remote for him to go, and nothing was too dangerous. The novelties he collected astounded people almost 100 years ago; today, you can see some of the items he gathered in this book.

Those things included spiders and alligators that lurk beneath beds, squirrels that make knots with their tails, and snakes that curl up in piles with other snakes. Ripley liked jeweled skulls, color-changing frogs, monster fish, and a bug that looks like he’s wearing fiber optics.

Ripley liked oddities, too: names that are super-long or made up of silly words; “death zones” on mountains; rickety wooden sidewalks on the face of a sheer cliff; pictures of sneezes; chewing gum portraits; or South African games that involve spitting antelope poop.

He saw rainbow trees in Hawaii, rainbow waterfalls in British Columbia, or rainbow mountains in China.

He also liked things that were outside of normal, like the world’s shortest lady, the tallest man, the largest waist and hips, the biggest foot, the longest tongue, and the longest fingernails.

That and more is in this book, believe it or not.

In the first few pages of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Reality Shock!” the authors promise readers that “everything in this book is definitely true.” For parents and grandparents, that’s really good news: ever since we were kids, Ripley’s stories have been based on authenticity and that hasn’t changed — it just gets weirder for the next generation of readers to enjoy.

And enjoy it they will, because this book is filled with everything a kid could want: disgustingly fascinating full-color pictures, quick anecdotes to share with friends, entries to astound, and superlatives that could spark creativity.

Packed as it is with that kind of greatness, I can’t imagine any kid age 12-and-up who wouldn’t like to page through this book. Leave “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Reality Shock!” lying around the house, and I think even reluctant readers will want to get their fingers on it.

“Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Reality Shock!,” by Ripley Publishing [256 pages, 2014, $28.95].

Terri Schlichenmeyer never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill with two dogs and 12,000 books.