Four books in one: The ultimate compendium of the New York Times–bestselling series filled with hilariously wrong test answers from real-life classrooms.

This fun omnibus features the complete content from all four books in the popular series—F in Exams, F for Effort, F this Test, and F in Exams: Pop Quiz—plus more than one hundred brand-new, sadly real, hilariously wrong, and sometimes admirably creative student answers (Q: What is the role of a catalyst in a chemical reaction? A: It lists the cats involved).

Also including bonus trivia in the form of “Stuff They Should Have Taught Us in School” facts (did you know a sneeze can travel up to 100 MPH?), this A+ collection will amuse anyone facing down a test as well as those happy to have the classroom behind them.

In the summer of 1994, when Molly Brodak was thirteen years old, her father robbed eleven banks, until the police finally caught up with him. Dubbed the “Mario Brothers Bandit” by the FBI, he served seven years in prison and was released, only to rob another bank several years later and end up back behind bars.

In her powerful and provocative memoir, Molly Brodak recounts her childhood and attempts to make sense of her complicated relationship with her father, a man she only half knew. At some angles he was a normal father: there was a job at the GM factory, a house with a yard, birthday treats for Molly and her sister. But there were darker glimmers, too: another wife he never mentioned to her mother, late-night rages directed at the TV, the red Corvette that suddenly appeared in the driveway, a gift for her sister. In Bandit, Brodak unearths and reckons with the fracturing impact her father had on their family and in the process attempts to make peace with the parts of herself that she inherited from this bewildering, beguiling man.

The twenty-fourth edition in the bestselling bathroom-reading series is jam-packed with over 500 pages of absorbing trivia material.

The information miners at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute have unearthed a priceless collection of surprising, amazing, head-scratching, and hilarious articles. Divided by length for your sitting convenience, 24-Karat Gold is chock-full of little-known history, random origins, weird news, celebrity secrets, and urban legends. As always, you’ll find plenty of dumb criminals, clever wordplay, quirky quotations, and much, much more. Just open to any page—who knows what treasures await you?

· Judges gone wild

· The Barbie scandals

· Canada’s underpants king

· Helen Keller: vaudeville star

· The double A-bomb survivors

· The history of the umbrella

· America’s forbidden island

· What the Hokey Pokey is really all about

And much, much more

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe.

Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought.