The Complete Kennections
5,000 Questions in 1,000 Puzzles
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
National Bestseller
The first new trivia book in more than a decade from Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings—based on his hugely popular online game “Kennections”!
Five trivia questions. Five answers that share a secret theme. What's the “Kennection”?
Since 2012, Jeopardy! champion and host Ken Jennings has created a weekly puzzle—first appearing in Parade, then Mental Floss—involving a series of trivia questions whose answers have something in common. The trivia questions run the gamut of topics—from pop culture (movies, TV, music) to academic knowledge (history, geography, the arts) to lifestyle (food and drink, sports, hobbies). But the trickiest part might be finding the “Kennection” that links all five answers. Many are standard trivia categories (D-Day beaches! Presidential middle names! Santa’s reindeer! Batman villains!), but almost anything goes, so thinking outside the box is just as important as trivia knowledge. What do feet, McDonald’s, fingerprints, and St. Louis have in common? They all have arches. What about Mercury, Chihuahuas, electrons, and Rhode Island? They’re all the smallest of their kind. Columbia, Grease, and “I Ran” (by A Flock of Seagulls)? They’re homophones for nations of the world.
For the first time, the Kennections canon is available in one convenient volume, with hundreds of new and updated quizzes. The Complete Kennections is the perfect gift for any Jeopardy! fan, trivia buff, or New York Times “Connections” puzzler.
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This entertaining and stimulating brain teaser from Jeopardy! host Jennings (100 Places to See After You Die) is based on his popular online game series of the same name. "Kennections" began in 2012 when Jennings—then a record-setting game show contestant—was approached by Parade magazine about authoring a weekly puzzle in which the player would answer five trivia questions and then detect the commonality between the answers. (Parade initially suggested something far more complicated but unprintable in its allotted space; Jennings, ever the master puzzler, solved this problem by streamlining it into its current form.) A hit in print became a hit online when Jennings moved the puzzle series from Parade to the website Mental Floss. The thousand puzzles collected here are not organized by theme, preventing the player from cherry picking categories in their comfort zone, and trying to beat them quickly becomes addictive. "Being a trivia person breaks your brain," Jennings writes, but if his brain is broken, it does not show. Viewers of Jeopardy! won't be surprised by the humor here: the introduction is titled "Kenfessions," the instructions are "Kenstructions," and the people he thanks in the acknowledgements are "Kentributors." Jennings is having a lot of fun with this, and it's infectious.
