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A review by robinsbooks
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment by A.J. Jacobs
4.0
I love this guy... His THE KNOW-IT-ALL is one of my favorite nonfiction books.
Update: This was a fast and easy read and quite funny in places. What I like about A.J. is his willingness to completely dedicate himself to some form of human social experiment (for the lack of a better term). In his first book, The Know-It-All he read the entire Encylopedia Britannica from A-Z and in The Year of Living Biblically he lived according to the laws (some of them very strange) of the Bible. In this book he undertakes various experiments on various ways of life and then writes articles for Esquire magazine, which are reprinted in this book with updates. He is funny and irreverent with a self-deprecating style that had me snickering and giggling in places.
A.J. spends a period of time (month or so) in some kind of social interaction such as "radical honesty" where he could only tell the truth and nothing but the truth for a period of time and he attempted to live like George Washington according to his tenents. He also reported on the month he spent waiting on his wife hand and foot, which she said was the best month of her life. I also liked the time he decided to do only one task at a time, which meant no multi-tasking such as reading while eating, no typing emails while on the phone, etc. In the end he admits that while nothing really stuck, he found himself adopting a few of the new behaviors and felt like he became a little bit of a better person for going through the experiments.
Update: This was a fast and easy read and quite funny in places. What I like about A.J. is his willingness to completely dedicate himself to some form of human social experiment (for the lack of a better term). In his first book, The Know-It-All he read the entire Encylopedia Britannica from A-Z and in The Year of Living Biblically he lived according to the laws (some of them very strange) of the Bible. In this book he undertakes various experiments on various ways of life and then writes articles for Esquire magazine, which are reprinted in this book with updates. He is funny and irreverent with a self-deprecating style that had me snickering and giggling in places.
A.J. spends a period of time (month or so) in some kind of social interaction such as "radical honesty" where he could only tell the truth and nothing but the truth for a period of time and he attempted to live like George Washington according to his tenents. He also reported on the month he spent waiting on his wife hand and foot, which she said was the best month of her life. I also liked the time he decided to do only one task at a time, which meant no multi-tasking such as reading while eating, no typing emails while on the phone, etc. In the end he admits that while nothing really stuck, he found himself adopting a few of the new behaviors and felt like he became a little bit of a better person for going through the experiments.