The Know-It-All
One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Ratings20
Average rating3.7
15
One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Ratings20
Average rating3.7
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 Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.
33,000 PAGES
44 MILLION WORDS
10 BILLION YEARS OF HISTORY
1 OBSESSED MAN
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 Encyclopedia 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 unconvinced.
Reviews with the most likes.
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.”
