Very interesting book full of short stories of the bizarre, weird and coincidental.
Fun to read.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC of this book. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.


This was an interesting read with a wide variety of incredibly short stories. It would be good to pick up when you have 15-20 minutes to read.

I do wish the stories had been a little bit longer. They were so short that you barely had a taste for each one before moving onto the next. It was difficult to retain anything with how quickly we moved on from each story.

This was a different type of nonfiction that was as unique as the podcast itself I suppose. While I’ve never listened to the podcast I feel the way the author tells his tidbits of random information would be similar.

This was an interesting book to pick up randomly from time to time when I had a few minutes. It’s not something I would’ve continued to read for hours on end but there were some pretty interesting tales in here and some that didn’t peek my interest as much but they were all rather short to read nevertheless.

What I really appreciated about this book was that it was broken up into categories from American History facts to stories of Creatures, Literature, Inventions, even Origin Stories plus some. This book is packed full of random short tales and as the title suggests, it is indeed “a historical tour of the unbelievable, the unsettling, and the bizarre.”

3.5 stars

Cabinet of Curiosities by Aaron Mahnke is a treasure trove of weird and whacky people, places and things recorded over the past few centuries. Divided into topical chapters, these strange but true short stories are written with wit, humour, word plays and surprise twists.

"Wonder rooms" became trendy hundreds of years ago, ideal distractions for bored and curious aristocrats who wanted to show off and study their acquisitions. Some of my favourite curiosities in this bookish cabinet include a cab accident which involved the same car, same driver and same passenger one year apart; Mike the Chicken; the six-mile fall survivor; the man who was in the right place at the right time to save two falling babies on two separate occasions; a woman who survived being frozen solid out in the snow; the incredible tale of the pilot who got sucked out of the plane windshield; famous author stories and the flaked cereal mistake.

My only wish would be less Wikipedia representation. Nevertheless, the stories and writing enthrall and are fun snippets to dip in and out of at will.

My sincere thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this absorbing book.