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"Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. To fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League education, A.J. Jacobs sets for himself the daunting task of reading all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His wife, Julie, tells him it's a waste of time, his friends believe he is losing his mind, and his father, a brilliant attorney who had once attempted the same feat and quit somewhere around Borneo, is encouraging but, shall we say, unconvinced. With self-deprecating wit and a disarming frankness, The Know-It-All recounts the unexpected and comically disruptive effects Operation Encyclopedia has on every part of Jacobs's life -- from his newly minted marriage to his complicated relationship with his father and the rest of his charmingly eccentric New York family to his day job as an editor at Esquire. Jacobs's project tests the outer limits of his stamina and forces him to explore the real meaning of intelligence as he endeavors to join Mensa, win a spot on Jeopardy!, and absorb 33,000 pages of learning. On his journey he stumbles upon some of the strangest, funniest, and most profound facts about every topic under the sun, all while battling fatigue, ridicule, and the paralyzing fear that attends his first real-life responsibility -- the impending birth of his first child. The Know-It-All is an ingenious, mightily entertaining memoir of one man's intellect, neuroses, and obsessions and a soul-searching, ultimately touching struggle between the all-consuming quest for factual knowledge and the undeniable gift of hard-won wisdom"--Book description.… (more)
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A.J.’s quest to be the “Smartest Person in the World” included becoming a member of the elite organization, Mensa (although A.J. was accepted on the strength of his old SAT scores, having failed the actual Mensa test). This entitled him to receive the Mensa Bulletin, which has announcements for Mensa’s special interest groups, like M-Prisoned, for Mensans who are incarcerated. A.J. particularly enjoyed finding typos in the Mensa Bulletin, which gave him a “special immature thrill.”
The Encyclopaedia project allowed A.J. to interject new knowledge into daily conversation. For example, he and Julie, his wife, visited friends for a summer barbecue and some quodlibet (free-ranging conversation on a topic of choice, as in “Louis IX allowed his courtiers to engage in quodlibet after meals”). Friends and family of A.J. did not find this practice endearing. In fact, Julie started fining A.J. for every spontaneous fact that was not directly relevant, such as, “Did you know that René Descartes has a fetish for women with crossed eyes?”
A.J. does point out some very significant historical facts unfamiliar to many people, including the Taiping Rebellion and the Tunguska event. The Taiping Rebellion occurred in south and central China from 1850 to 1865. The import of this rebellion is that it resulted in about 20 million military and civilian deaths! In comparison, our own bloody Civil War took less than 700,000 lives.
The Tunguska event was a massive aerial explosion in central Siberia in 1908 that flattened more than 80 million trees over approximately 830 sq. miles. The energy of the explosion was equivalent to that of 10-15 megatons of TNT. Although the cause of the blast is still unclear, it was likely the result of either a large meteoroid or comet fragment exploding 3-6 miles above the earth.
I can’t say that I felt saddened when A.J. finished reading the last entry of the last volume, “Zywiec,” as I did when I read the last paragraph of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," but the Encyclopaedia project was interesting, educational, and, sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny. I also remain solidly in the observer status of this quest, with not even a hint of desire to read the entire Britannica, or any other encyclopedia.
A couple of years ago, my wife talked me into giving away my set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I really hadn't touched them since high school, but did have an emotional attachment to them. My parents bought them for me when I was a kid, to help me out in school. That was when EB had door to door salesmen peddling them. I guess they represented my parents' support for me, their willingness to do whatever it took to help me out, because the set wasn't cheap. And we weren't rich.
I actually had the idea of reading the whole set at one time. I think I must've gotten the idea from the movie, Dr. No, when the character of Honey Rider, played by Ursula Andress, told Bond that she had started reading the encyclopedia from A-Z when she was 8. But of course, I never did. There aren't too many goals in my life that I have actually followed through on, so no surprise here. But reading this book makes me wish I had.
As silly as it seems to read a person reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it sure beats reading some dude reading Derrida, which I occasionally get tricked into doing. I found much of it very entertaining. In my first sitting with this, I read his snarky quote regarding Keanu Reeve’s [lack of] acting ability. I had emailed a similar K.R. slam to a friend not two hours earlier and I haven’t even seen a movie starring that jack ass in a decade! I knew I’d like this book.
Additionally, I can relate to his quest of filling in the innumerable gaps within his knowledge/information database (assuming this was not simply an angle to get a book published). In contrast to his pockmarked intellectual landscape, my knowledge topography is something more akin to a mountain (or at least a sizable hill) of mostly boring architecture crap immediately bordering a Grand Canyon devoid of every other worldly thing that any given person would want to discuss over cocktails. So I’ve finally established a system of forgoing yet another Vidler book attempting to explain how modern architecture relates to inexplicable French theories to instead shovel books on Taxes, Baseball, Charles Lindberg, Neuroscience, Witch Hunts, and, of course, some guy reading EB into my prodigious mental abyss.
When I saw the premise of Know-It-All I knew this book was for me, and it
The author juxtaposes amusing entries from the encyclopedia with anecdotes from his personal life during this intense encyclopedia reading year. Laugh out loud funny in parts I highly recommend it to all the book nerds out there who ever wanted to, but didn't read the encyclopedia.
Each entry is like a little distilled essay or meditation, encapsulating facts and storyline. I would say that the book definitely has a "plot," which you might not really expect when you see the format of emboldened words followed by text. You get caught up in Jacobs' quest, in large part because his enthuasiasm is so infectious. And let's face it, most of us are only going to read the encyclopedia vicariously, so what better way to do it than to pick up this humorous, tongue-in-cheek volume?
I enjoyed the book because I felt deep connections to his love of
Full Review at Grasping for the Wind
Jacobs manages to do something that most of us couldn't even begin to start on-reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. And even more amazingly, he made the experiance interesting. You get a good look at his