Monday, November 25, 2013

Review of "Baltimore Orioles IQ"

I received a request from the publisher of this book for a review.  Mildly surprised to see a request to review a trivia book, I decided to go for it and I was glad I did.  Even though this isn't my favorite team and as a result, I didn't do so good on the trivia questions it is still a book worth consideration.  Here is my review of "Baltimore Orioles IQ."


Title/Author:
“Baltimore Orioles IQ: The Ultimate Test of True Fandom” by Tucker Elliot

Tags:
Baseball, trivia, Orioles

Published:
October 13, 2013

Length:
148 pages

Rating: 
3 1/2 of 5 stars (good)

Review:
Books on sports trivia can be tricky to review as a reviewer may not know much about the topic and therefore may not know the accuracy of the information as presented.   I found this to be my dilemma when a review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher who requested that I review it.   Feeling up to a challenge, I decided to give it a go and also contacted the author in case I had any questions.

While I have not followed the Baltimore Orioles closely so some of the material would not be known to me, I did find that the book had some very good narrative pieces and was organized well.   I felt it was clever that the questions were divided up by topics and each topic was an “inning.”  For example, the first inning was about numbers worn by Orioles players.  There were 20 questions on this topic, with 10 questions asked in the “top of the first” and the other 10 questions asked in the “bottom of the first.”  There were 10 such innings for a total of 200 questions.   The difficulty of the questions, at least to this serious baseball fan who follows a different team, ranged from fairly easy to having no clue to the answer without searching Google.

Without doing a through fact check on the validity of each question, I did match the answers to the questions I did not know back to the question to at least see if they made sense from what I did know or recall.   While this may not a totally accurate way to verify information, I did find it useful in order to get a feel if this was a trivia book that would be useful to baseball fans, especially Orioles fans, and I found it to be that.   If I did want more information on a question, I contacted the author who was very responsive and helpful. 

Elliot has written several of these trivia books on different teams and is continuing to do so.  That is good news for baseball fans, for if you like trivia books on your favorite team, this format makes reading them and answering the questions easy and fun.   I recommend this book for both Orioles fans and hard-core baseball trivia buffs. 

Did I skim?
No. 

Pace of the book: 
I was able to go through the questions pretty quickly.   The organization of the topics helped with that, along with the answers being listed at the end of each half inning instead of the back of the book.

Do I recommend? 
Yes to Orioles fans, as they would enjoy this book best.  It would be also good for trivia buffs who want to win the next round of bets with their buddies for some lesser-known facts.

Book Format Read:

E-Book (PDF)

Buying Links:


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