I was recently given a review copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Seeing Is Believing.

The problem is, I’ve never done an official review of anything before.

I guess the first thing to determine is my unit of measurement. That seems to be the thing that really brands you and makes you popular, ensuring that more people will send you free stuff. I’m pretty sure Siskel & Ebert came up with the thumbs up/thumbs down thing. Rotten Tomatoes uses, um, tomatoes. And I don’t know who came up with the star system (I give this 4 out of five stars!), but I’m sure he must be making a lot of bank these days.

While thumbs, tomatoes and stars are all very good units of measurement, since I specialize in things that are childlike, I’ve decided go with marbles. They’re timeless, and everybody knows that marbles are cool and more is better. My top rating will be five marbles. Not four, because that seems too limiting, but not ten because that seems too nuanced and I sometimes have a hard time making decisions.

Now that I’ve got that cleared up, I’ve got to figure out what exactly am I basing this review on. That’s a big factor, after all. Some of the most entertaining movies of all time (I’m looking at you, Dumb & Dumber), would never be given a shred of critical acclaim or Oscar buzz (mainly because the Academy is stifled by Adultitis).

Again, I feel my area of focus requires me to overlook technical merits, production values, and the sorts of things that would make Strunk & White giddy. Quite simply, you get five marbles if your book/movie/product does an exemplary job of decreasing Adultitis and inviting the inner child out to play.

Finally, on to the review. (This is a lot of work!)

Here’s what I can tell you about Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Seeing Is Believing:

There are pictures. Lots of them. (And in color, too!) For instance, there’s a picture of a dude with a watermelon being blown off the top of his head by his rifle-weilding brother. Pretty cool, huh? Then there’s the three-year-old that weighs 142 pounds, a pesron with eight toes on one foot, and a guy with a thumbnail almost five feet long. And I mustn’t neglect to mention the picture that shows New Zealand shepherds competing in a race in which they must bite into bulls testicles and carry them with their mouths for 65 feet.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering about that blue ball in the photo above. Is it a giant jawbreaker? An asteroid from another planet? A kidney stone from the world’s largest Smurf? Nope. It’s a baseball. Covered with 17,000 coats of paint. Here’s the story from Ripley’s web site which features book extras:

Every day since 1977, house painter Mike Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana, has applied at least one coat of paint to a regulation baseball. More than 17,000 coats of paint later, the initial 9-in (22cm) circumference has ballooned to more than 104 in (264 cm), and the weight of the ball has increased to 1,100 lb (500 kg) making it the world’s largest ball of paint. Mike lets a guest of honor paint every hundredth coat, and has kept detailed records of the many colors of the ball’s layers. The ball has now grown so big that he has had to build a special room in his house just to store it.

Aside from all the photos, the book is jammed with tons of unbelievable crazy factoids:

• In 2006, 104-year-old Wook Kundor of Kuala Berang, Malaysia, married her 21st husband–a man 71 years younger than herself.

• The body of a 32-year-old man from Mindoro Island in the Philippines was recovered inside a 23-ft python in 1988.

• Dave Nunley from Cambridgeshire, England, has eaten nothing but grated mild Cheddar cheese for over 25 years and goes through 238 lbs of it every year.

This book reminds me of an old copy Guinness Book of World Records I used to own as a boy. I remember marveling at the grainy black-and-white photos of the dude with the world’s longest beard and the fat twins riding motorcycles. This book is like that one, but on steroids. I’m not sure it would make a good coffee table book, but it’s definitely a swell bathroom read.

It’s also a fun one to share with your kids, especially boys who are currently captivated by all things gross. It does a good job arousing curiosity and challenging our assumptions of what’s possible. One caveat: due to the extreme nature of some of the contents, you may want to steer clear the little ones.

Unless you want to get into a discussion about bull testicles with your three-year-old.

All in all, I know my inner child was delighted. In reading the book I was simultaneously amazed, shocked, disgusted, and utterly horrified.

Sounds like a five-marble book to me.

Jason Kotecki is a dad who also moonlights as an artist, author, and professional speaker. Jason and his wife Kim (a former kindergarten teacher) make it their mission in life to fight Adultitis and help people use strategies from childhood to create lives with less stress and more fun. Stop by www.KimandJason.com and follow them on Twitter @kimandjason