The Know-It-All
One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Ratings33
Average rating3.5
I hated this book to start. The format made me feel frustrated at its disjointedness. By the end, though, I had come to love the wry tone of the narrator and the ability to learn some random facts while enjoying a memoir.
Loved, this book! I'm a learner myself, so reading of someone else's adventure to learn as much as possible is definitely good entertainment in my book. :) Some parts were so humorous they made me laugh out loud, regardless of where I was, or if it was appropriate to be laughing out loud or not.
It was a unique memoir that follow's A.J.'s year of reading through the encyclopedia. He selects a few entries from each letter of the alphabet and tells us something – usually humorous – about it or his view of it, and weaves in stories from his childhood and his life as he goes through a year in which he and his wife are trying to conceive. I found it interesting, funny and educational.
In The Know-It-All, the American journalist A.J. Jacobs hits a premature mid-life crisis and decides to read all of the 33000 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his job as Esquire editor he has to decide on:
“whether we should run the cleavage shot or the butt shot of the actress of the month”.
“long, slow slide into dumbness”
“Reading the Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system, one with no shortage of shows about Sumerian cities.”
“Heroin was first developed by the Bayer Company. That'll whisk your headache away faster than a couple of dozen aspirin. Take two syringefuls and call me in the morning. Or late afternoon.”
“If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have “Jacobs” be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.”
A book about reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Wouldn't it be boring? Well, not this book! Jacobs doesn't just relay the entries from A to Z but adds his comments and thoughts about what he learns both from the volumes and the events and people in his life. Some of my favorite portions include his visiting the Chicago headquarters and learns how entries are created, checked, and indexed as well as his preparation for and participation on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
This was a cool book. A guy decides to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and selects interesting and humorous highlights to include in the book. It also details some of his life story.