The Art of Shen Ku

Paperback, USA.

The Art of Shen Ku is a compendium of semi-useful knowledge by Zeek. It includes lots of highly illustrated information that would be helpful to a traveler and explorer like navigation and first aid, a lot of basic martial arts, and, unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense. While an experienced skeptic can easily gleam useful information from crap, there is nothing to explain to the inexperienced reader which is factual and which is crap. Because of this, I would not recommend this book because without a lot of extra research, there is no simple way to know when the information is right, partially right, or dangerously wrong.

I received this book as a gift from my girlfriend at the time. When I got it, I found it to be very interesting and right up my ally, but as I learned how much pseudoscience was it it, it quickly lost my favor.

Status

I own a paperback copy of this book and have read most of it.

Review

Good

• The book is fully illustrated with line art.
• A lot of the information tables are especially useful.

Bad

• To give the book an informal feeling, the author uses Comic Sans for the entire book. GAH!

Ugly

• The book contains a lot of information that is so wrong it can be dangerous. For example, it contains herbal remedies for diseases like HIV, it tells you to stop wearing corrective lenses, it also has tricks to know when a woman is ovulating (possibly so you won't need to use protection?).

Links

• goodreads.com/book/show/301811.The_Art_of_Shen_Ku - GoodReads.