Book Review: The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

Book Review: The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
By: A.J. Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs, editor at Esquire, decided to pick up the challenge his father had abandoned years prior; read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover, from a-ak to zywiec. And he does. He buys the very expensive encyclopedia set, and over a year, reads every entry. His eyes hit every word. He even goes as far as to take Britannica on vacation to Italy (not the whole set, just the letter he was reading at the time).

The Know-It-All is set out similar to an encyclopedia as you follow Jacob’s journey through from A-Z. Each chapter is a letter in the alphabet and he touches on some of the more interesting passages and what they meant to him, or how they related to his current life. The interesting thing for the reader was that Jacob’s journey was not only informative (of course–he’s reading and talking about the encyclopedia), but is was also a witty and interesting, real-time autobiography. We followed A.J.’s journey through infertility and rode alongside, hoping for his wife to become pregnant as though she and Jacobs were friends or family. We even battle his arch nemesis and watch him grow as a character. It’s like an autobiography, novel and encyclopedia all wrapped into one.

As Jacobs continues through the encyclopedia, he sets challenges for himself, such as joining Mensa and getting on a trivia show gameshow, etc. It is a hilarious and educational book which my husband dislikes because it was ‘disturbing.’ Read that: My wife laughed out loud all the freaking time and it disrupted my own very boring and dry reading. Grr. However, I fear that I, too, will be suffering from the Ebbinghaus Curve (forgetting curve) and will forget all the interesting little tidbits from the book. Seriously, I think I need to read the book a second time so I’ll finally have a hope at whooping my husband’s butt at Trivial Pursuit.

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