The stories are grouped by subject, including "Dog Tales" and "Just Desserts," "Sexcapades" and "Losing Face." There are baby stories and work stories, criminal tales and college anecdotes, plus stories of mistaken identity, human nature, and technology. Brunvand achieves more, however, than a mere compendium of highly entertaining stories. He discusses the nature of urban legends--those almost believable, addictively retellable tales that always happened to a friend of a friend (FOAF, in folklorist parlance)--and for each individual story, Brunvand includes as much of its history as he has been able to trace, including newspaper accounts, alternative versions, and the story's natural cycle, that is, how many years, typically, between resurfacings. The result is an exceptionally engaging book and a great resource for debunking that next story, as heard from a friend by that unnamed acquaintance of unassailable honesty, that sounds just a little too perfect to swallow whole. --Stephanie Gold

Portable Snopes rehashes same old stories.   October 31, 2004

Fun and interesting read   April 15, 2004

So bottom line: Fun book - it will keep you entertained and give you the upper hand next time someone tries to tell you one of these legends.


Colossal Book of Urban Legends   September 9, 2002
  3 out of 3 found this review helpful

For those who don't know, Jan Harold Brunvand has a column out in Salt Lake City, but has acquired a following all across the country, or rather the world. He is the leading scholar on the subject of urban legends, those sometimes funny and often terrifying stories you first heard on the playground or by the watercooler, which are always supposed to be true but can't be proved because they happened to a friend of a friend of a friend . . . This book, the "Colossal Book of Urban Legends" is really an updated combination of most of Brunvand's previous books, such as "The Vanishing Hitchhiker", "The Choking Doberman" and "The Baby Train". In other words, if you are going to buy this book, I doubt think you'll want to buy all the previous ones, though there might be a few stories in those not included here.


Just tell us the legends please   April 10, 2002
  2 out of 18 found this review helpful

Well, this thick tome is basically a collection of urban legends, which is, unless you have been hiding under a rock, are stories which people tell each other is true but has no real basis in facts. Who haven't heard of alligators in the sewers, the woman who cooked her cat in the microwave, the hooked killer, and so on. Usually, after the story are told, there is a little caption that suggest how the legend may have started

As fascinating as these stories are, the book itself leaves something to be desired. Because it seems all too often, the author is either constantly doubting that this is a true story (duh!) or that he cannot believe in the gullibility of people (there is quite a liberal amount of self righteous sarcasm).

Okay, we got the message! Just tell us the stories and give us the facts. The book would otherwise woudl have worked more effectively in giving me the creeps. But it didn't. Maybe it wasn't suppose to.

Still, I can't help but think that the author insulted my intelligence.


Four stars, but only in the Bathroom Reader category   November 11, 2001
  8 out of 15 found this review helpful

Urban legends are anecdotal yarns, sworn to be factually based, which become embellished to the point of being "too good to be true" as they percolate through society. Today's urban legends will become the future's fairy tales.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE is an assemblage of over 200 such stories gathered by Jan Brunvand, who is an expert, perhaps obsessively so, on the subject. They cover a wide range of source topics: pets, criminals, cars, sex, accidents, babies, work, technology, human nature, mistaken ID, academia, food, the supernatural, wild animals, and more. They inspire laughter, horror, disbelief, or just plain "Oh, yuck!" Each story is followed by a paragraph, sometimes lengthy, on the times and places the anecdote, or some variant of it, has appeared. Some go back to the 19th century. After the first twenty-five or so, I decided to leave this last bit to the truly compulsive.

My favorite was the one about the American couple staying at the Moscow hotel during the bad old Soviet era. Obsessed with the possible presence of listening devices, the couple searched the room for "bugs". Finding only a metal plate under the carpet, they removed the screws from it. The next morning on checkout, the desk manager asked if they'd spent a pleasant night. He was concerned since the couple in the room below our intrepid travelers had the chandelier fall on them. My wife said she's never seen me laugh so hard.

The trouble with these stories is that they have no developing plot, no hero to love, and no villain to hate. Like eating popcorn, the experience, however delightful, ends with the last kernel/paragraph. Nobody ever exclaims, "Wow, I had a great bag of popcorn last week!" Similarly, I doubt this book will stay memorable for more than a minute. As a bathroom diversion for those contemplative moments, it stands out. Otherwise, it's light reading with a capital "L".