"Unless I am wrong and I am never wrong."

A Book Review for Super Pop!: Pop Culture Top Ten Lists to Help You Win at Trivia, Survive in the

David peruses Super Pop over a light lunch.

Wild, and Make it Through the Holidays.

Super Pop is a "bathroom book" or the book you leave lying around your house for guests to pick up and casually flip through to begin conversations. This is not a book you read cover-to-cover unless you are really looking to waste time. Majority of the illustrations are black and white, feature the superhero mascot of the book, and resemble the notebook doodles of a teenager.


The book is a series of top ten lists with snappy titles ("Gain Emotional Intelligence: Because Sometimes IQ Isn't Enough") that are fairly well-rounded and up-to date. Are today's teenagers (the reader the author had in mind when writing this book) familiar with Seinfeld? They may not be but Daniel Harmon, also the editorial director of Zest Books, drops the long-running sitcom in the same list with the currently airing Modern Family.

The beginning of the subtitle of this book is what caught my eye and made me request it: "To help you win at trivia." I am a trivia buff and love information but imagine my surprise as I was flipping through the book and found an ERROR. Yes, Harmon is a "pop culture connoisseur" and there is straight-up wrong information in his book.

In the list titled "Ten Essential Catchphrases for Use At Dinner Parties" Harmon quotes Ken, a character from the popular Capcom video game "Street Fighter." Street Fighter is a lucrative series and has been around since the late 1980's. The book says that one of Ken's phrases is "Sonic Boom!" This is incorrect and it seems the author has confused one American blonde character from the series with another American blonde character: Guile.

Ken was trained under a karate master in Japan and when Ken throws his projectile he says "Hadoken!"  Guile is a member of the US Air Force and he shouts "Sonic Boom!" when he throws his projectile.

Are there more errors in this book? I don't know because that one mistake shattered my confidence and I put the book down. I would proceed with caution when repeating anything read in Super Pop unless you know it to be true.

This review can also be found over at LibraryThing.