The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World - Hardcover

Jacobs, A. J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743250605 ISBN 13: 9780743250603

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

Chronicles the efforts of an NPR contributor to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z, sharing the humorous and unexpected mishaps that occurred as a result of the endeavor, from changed dynamics in his family relationships to his efforts to join Mensa and win a spot on Jeopardy! By the author of Fractured Fairy Tales. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

A.J. Jacobs is the author of The New York Times bestsellers The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment and The Know-It-All. He has been called "inspired and inspiring" (Vanity Fair), "entertaining" (New York Times) and "hilarious" (Time). He is the editor at large of Esquire magazine, a contributor to NPR, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City with his wife Julie and their children. Visit him at AJJacobs.com and follow him on Twitter @ajjacobs. 

From the Inside Flap

"The Know-It-All is a hilarious book and quite an impressive achievement. I've always said, why doesn't someone put out a less complete version of the encyclopedia? Well done, A.J." --Jon Stewart, Host of The Daily Show

"I fell in love with this book on page one and I have laughed out loud on every page since. With his hilarious Britannica-fed insights on life, A.J. Jacobs uncovers the profound by way of the trivial. The Know-It-All is endlessly entertaining. Genius, pure." --Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Reviews

Adult/High School - When Jacobs, a pop-culture junkie and magazine editor, got a bee in his bonnet to read the entire abridged set of the Encyclopedia Britannica to stave off the decline of his recalled knowledge, his wife, family, and coworkers looked on with disbelief, amusement, and annoyance. They thought he'd give up on his quest, but fortunately he did not, for his recap manages to impart the joys of learning, along with a lot of laughs. The alphabetical arrangement of his book allows Jacobs to share highlights, many of which show his fixation on the morbid, the insane, and the grotesque in history. Cortés had syphilis. Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women. Throughout, the author digresses with anecdotes about such things as his trip to a Mensa meeting, his visit with Alex Trebek, and (mainly) his wife's attempts to get pregnant. While the pregnancy woes probably won't hold the same resonance with teens as with adults, they are all short, and soon there is another funny or gross item. As Jacobs wraps up, he leaves readers with the sense of satisfaction and wistfulness that often occurs when finishing a particularly satisfying book, only multiplied by the magnitude of what he has accomplished. This is a love note to human knowledge and the joys of obtaining it. - Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We’re in looking glass territory here, as many reviewers spent as much time on New York Times Book Review Queenan’s hack-job as they did on Esquire editor Jacobs’s book. Reviews of reviews are always awkward, especially when they flock to the defense of a book as harmless as Jacobs’s. Maybe Know-It-All isn’t an intellectual treatise; but, then again, it isn’t meant to be. Its pop culture-obsessed author clearly is out for some fun, often at his own expense. The alphabetical structure and wisecracking prose only underscore the playfulness of The Know-It-All, even if it gets certain factoids wrong. Which begs the question: what side of the "A" volume did Queenan wake up on? One must assume the backside.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Imagine, the original Berserkers were "savage Norse soldiers" of the Middle Ages who went into battle stark naked! Or consider the Etruscan habit of writing in "boustrophedon style." Intrigued? Well, either hunker down with your own Encyclopædia Britannica, or buy Esquire editor Jacobs's memoir of the year he spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition—that's 33,000 pages with some 44 million words. Jacobs set out on this delightfully eccentric endeavor attempting to become the "smartest person in the world," although he agrees smart doesn't mean wise. Apart from the sheer pleasure of scaling a major intellectual mountain, Jacobs figured reading the encyclopedia from beginning to end would fill some gaps in his formal education and greatly increase his "quirkiness factor." Reading alphabetically through whole topics he never knew existed meant he'd accumulate huge quantities of trivia to insert into conversations with unsuspecting victims. As his wife shunned him and cocktail party guests edged away, Jacobs started testing his knowledge in a hilarious series of humiliating adventures: hobnobbing at Mensa meetings, shuffling off to chess houses, trying out for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, visiting his old prep school, even competing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Indeed, one of the book's strongest parts is its laugh-out-loud humor. Jacobs's ability to juxtapose his quirky, sardonic wit with oddball trivia make this one of the season's most unusual books.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This clever book stems from the author's herculean effort to read every volume of the majestic Encyclopaedia Britannica, that erudite guide to all knowledge in the brief century before the Internet became the fountainhead of all truth, objective and subjective. Jacobs turns his quest for intellectual enlightenment into alphabetically ordered, humorous ruminations on all persons and events of his life, subverting Mortimer Adler's ecumenical achievement into nothing more than an organizing principle for A. J. Jacobs' autobiography. Most entries are short, but some run to several pages of witty recollection of his family or an encounter with a favorite high-school teacher. Jacobs' cultural references will be familiar to anyone with common knowledge of current television and music celebrities. Plenty of good fun pours out of this prose, but Jacobs' Britannica-incited quest to become the smartest person in the world assumes that command of data is the mark of education rather than any sharply honed critical faculties. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743250605
• ISBN 13: 9780743250603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400