Encyclopedia Paranoiaca

“An amusing and cruelly accurate cultural critique” (The Wall Street Journal), this informative and utterly debilitating compendium explores the many surprising ways you might die a horrible death.Did you know that carrots cause blindness and bananas are radioactive? That too many candlelight dinners can cause cancer? And not only is bottled water a veritable petri dish of biohazards (so is tap water, by the way) but riding a bicycle might destroy your sex life?

In Encyclopedia Paranoiaca, master satirists Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf have assembled an authoritative and disturbingly comprehensive inventory of things poised to harm, maim, or kill you—all of them based on actual research about the perils of everyday life. Beard and Cerf cite convincing evidence that everyday things we consider healthy—eating leafy greens, flossing, washing our hands—are actually harmful, and items we thought were innocuous—drinking straws, flip-flops, neckties, skinny jeans—pose life-threatening dangers.

Hilarious, freakishly insightful, and “the only guide to super-paranoia that you’ll ever need” (Scientific American), Encyclopedia Paranoiaca brings to light a whole host of hidden threats and looming dooms that make asteroid impacts, planetary pandemics, and global warming look like a walk in the park (which is also emphatically not recommended).