THE TOP TEN OF EVERYTHING by...

THE TOP TEN OF EVERYTHING by Russell Ash (Dorling Kindersley: $14.95; 299 pp., illustrated, paperback original). The first American edition of a volume that appears annually in Britain, “Top Ten” contains some useful listings of the biggest, longest, most popular etc. It also offers quite a lot of useless data: Who needs to know that the word “the” appears 63,924 times in the Old and New Testaments? The book might help settle bar bets, but caveat lector: Not all of the information is correct. Ash lists the giant panda, which exists almost exclusively on bamboo, among the world’s largest carnivores.